She’s studying computers, isn’t she?

She probably typed that up herself this morning.”

I almost admired it.

Even cornered, even terrified, she reached instinctively for the same weapon she had always used on me — the accusation that my competence was itself a kind of dishonesty, that anything I was good at, I must have cheated to achieve.

It was the whole logic of my childhood, and she deployed it now, one last time, out of pure reflex.

And Dean Harrow, without a word, turned to the second page.