There was a man supervising.

There was a man for whom this was routine, administrative, a Tuesday.

And I understood, watching that terrible ordinary calm, that I had never known him at all — that the warm attentive person who brought me coffee and called me sweetheart was a performance as practiced as the one Ottavia gave her guests, and that the real Percival was the man in the chair, unmoved, at ease, watching.

I did not scream.

Some instinct older than my shock kept me silent behind that wall.

But something in me died very quietly in that moment, and something else was born in its place, and the thing that was born was cold, and clear, and entirely without illusions.