Chapter Seventeen
Dinner was entirely civil and a bit surreal. Zhi sat back and watched his mother make idle chit chat with Spin and Lark as though the earlier scene had never happened. He had changed his clothes. His mother wore a pale plaster on her temple. Spin sat with her hair free of the bandana, and they spoke about such mundane things as the weather, the sweetness of the meat Lin had prepared, and the refreshing citrus in the lemonade.
Lark made up the bulk of the conversation. He’d caught the magician’s assistant glance at his mother’s temple exactly once, but she never brought it up. Zhi doubted Spin had told her friend about the incident. In fact, he knew she hadn’t.
He wasn’t sure how he was certain. But he was. Likely, it was the same certainty he’d had when he’d stood next
