I could absorb any insult without a flicker.

I had a poker face forged in two decades of not being allowed to react, and they were proud of it, in their way, because it made me easy.\n\nWhat they never once imagined was that the skill they had built into me for their own convenience did not belong to them.

It was mine.

And a skill is neutral: it serves whatever purpose its owner points it at.

The same silence that had made me a convenient victim made me, when I finally turned it, a perfect investigator.

I could sit across from my sister with the security photograph of her burned thumb fresh in my mind and show her nothing.