The room stilled.
The curtains at the window swayed with the fresh wind. The clock on the mantle, which had been ticking for over a century without complaint, seemed to lose its rhythm for a single beat before recovering it.
Lorian's hand went still on her foot.
"That is not possible."
He said it too quickly. He heard himself say it too quickly.
And from the way Olga's eyes did not leave his face, from the way she watched him without blinking, without softening, without permitting him the comfort of his own denial, he understood, with a clarity that landed somewhere cold beneath his ribs, that she had heard it too.
The silence between them lengthened.
He waited for her to look away. To soften. To accept the lie the way she had accepted so many things in their twenty years of marriage, with the quiet, swallowed grace of a woman who knew when to spare him.
She did not look away.
