Refusal

( Marlowe)

I regretted it within the hour.

Not the truth of it. I still believed every word I'd said to him in that garden, believed it more with each passing day, if anything. What I regretted was handing it to a stranger. A man whose salary came from my husband's checkbook, whose file on me would land, eventually, on Thorne's desk whether Kael Everhart intended it to or not. I'd spent three years learning exactly how quickly my own words could be turned into evidence against me, and I'd just handed a brand-new interrogator the single most damaging sentence I owned.

So I froze him out.

It wasn't difficult. I'd had years of practice arranging my face into something pleasant and unreachable, and I put every bit of that training to use the following morning at breakfast, answering his careful questions with the same flat, agreeable non-answers I gave everyone else in this house.

"How did you sleep?"

"Fine."

"Any dreams you remember?"

"No."

"Yesterday, in the garden"

"I don't really remember what I said." I met his eyes as I said it, daring him to call the lie what it was. "I'd had a long day."

Something crossed his face, not hurt, exactly, though for one unguarded second I thought I saw something close to it and then it smoothed into the same careful, contained neutrality he'd worn since the moment he stepped out of that car.

"All right," he said simply, and didn't push.

I told myself that was proof of something. That a man working for Thorne would have pushed harder, would have needed the confession on record for whatever report he was clearly here to write. I told myself a lot of things that week, testing him the way you'd test a lock you didn't quite trust, looking for the give.

On Tuesday I told him something small and entirely fabricated that I'd been having trouble sleeping because of a repeating nightmare about the house catching fire, nothing subtle, nothing I actually believed he'd fail to catch as manufactured if he were paying real attention. I wanted to see whether it surfaced, distorted and dramatized, in some conversation with Thorne that evening. I sat at dinner two nights later, watching my husband's face for any flicker of borrowed knowledge about fires and nightmares.

Nothing came. Not that night, not the next. Thorne asked, as he always did, how my sessions with Kael were progressing, and I gave him the same vague, agreeable non-answer I gave everyone, and he seemed satisfied, entirely unaware of a fire that had never actually kept me up at all.

It should have reassured me. Instead it unsettled me in a different direction entirely because a man reporting faithfully to my husband would have surfaced that detail eventually, and a man not reporting to my husband at all was, in its own way, just as strange a thing to have living under this roof.

I started watching him instead of avoiding him. Small things. The way he took notes was not the constant, performative scribbling Voss used to do, pen moving whether or not anything worth recording had happened, but something sparser, more deliberate, as though he only wrote down what actually surprised him. The way he'd occasionally go still for a moment mid-conversation, somewhere else entirely behind his eyes, before refocusing on whatever I'd said.

I found him on Thursday evening in the small study off the east hallway, a room nobody in this house used for much besides storing old files nobody wanted to throw away, standing at the filing cabinet with a folder already open in his hands.

He looked up fast when I stepped through the doorway, and for the briefest possible second, before he composed himself, I saw something on his face I hadn't seen there yet. Not guilt exactly. Concentration, caught mid-motion, the look of someone doing something he hadn't planned on being interrupted during.

"That's my old medical file," I said, recognizing the letterhead even upside down from across the room. Beneath it, in the margin, I caught the edge of a handwritten note in ink too fresh to be Voss's careful, faded script a few words, hurried, half-covered by his hand before I could read the whole line. I only caught two letters at the very end, underlined once. B.C.

"I thought you had a copy already. From Thorne."

"I do." He closed the folder carefully, unhurried despite having been caught at something, the note vanishing back inside it before I could ask what it said. "I requested a second copy directly from your previous physician's office. Before Dr. Voss took over your care."

"Why would you need two copies of the same file?"

Kael looked at me for a long moment, weighing something, and I watched him make a decision I couldn't fully read yet, the stillness of a man deciding how much of the truth a situation could hold.

"Because they're not the same file," he said finally. "Not even close.”