A shouting match, Declan could have survived; he was good at those, good at reframing, at making me the hysterical one, at leaving a fight with the story bent back into his shape.

But you cannot reframe a cancellation timestamp.

You cannot charm a refund into having gone somewhere else.

The paper simply said what he had done, in the cold flat language of a booking system, and it said it in his own transactions, and there was no angle from which it read as anything but what it was: a man who, given a window, had removed a child from his family the way you’d remove a line item from a budget, and spent the savings on a nicer room.

He looked at those two pages for a long moment, and then he stopped arguing about the six days, because the six days had never been the real crime.