It was another to realize that she had looked into my face, in my own kitchen, and lied to me smoothly about a missing photograph she had herself hidden, and that I had believed her without a flicker of doubt, and gone on with my day.

How many other small lies had passed between us that easily?

How many times had I been managed, redirected, reassured, in that same untroubled tone, and simply never known?

The hidden photo was not just a cruelty to Hannah.

It was proof that the woman I was about to marry could lie to my face without the slightest tell, and that I could not, it turned out, tell when she was doing it.

That is a chilling thing to learn about a person, and I had learned it, by the grace of a locked door and a brave child, just barely in time.