Rex stopped dead. The sound of his boots halting was a sharp, final punctuation mark in the hollow corridor.
He turned to face her, and in the sterile, unyielding light of the Academy, his expression underwent a terrifying transformation. The mask of the colleague, the partner, the man she thought she was walking beside, simply dissolved.
He looked at her with a flat, unperforming attention, the kind of gaze a surgeon uses when he has stopped trying to comfort the patient and has begun the process of incision. It was the look of a man who had decided that the time for the constructed version of the truth had passed, and the accurate version was now required.
"Yes," he said.
The word was a heavy, singular blow. It didn't waver; it didn't apologize.
