It was, he believed, the thing that was finally going to make him as large as he had always felt he deserved to be.

“When this is over,” Charlotte murmured from her corner, swirling my wine, “you could start fresh, Gavin.

With someone who’s actually at your level.”

He smiled at her when she said it.

A real smile, warm, the kind he had not aimed at me in years.

At my level.

I filed that away too, with everything else, in the quiet place that had started doing math.

At my level. I turned the phrase over even then, in the middle of everything, because it told me the whole truth of what I had become to him.