She did not scream, did not drop the truffles, did not let them know she was there.

She covered her mouth, backed away, and walked out of her own house on legs that no longer felt like hers.

She would think, later, about the strangeness of her own silence in that hallway — how a woman discovering the deepest betrayal of her life had made no sound at all.

In the movies, the wronged wife screams, throws things, demands answers.

Linnea had done none of it, and it was not because she felt nothing.

It was because, in the instant she saw them, some deep protective instinct had closed over her like a reflex and whispered a single cold instruction: not yet. If she screamed, they would know.