“You don’t know?”

“No.

I’ve never met him.

I’m not going to guess at something that important.”

And Charlotte Sinclair nodded once — a short, businesslike nod — and I understood, in that second, that I had passed a test she had been running on me since 4:11, and that the test was not whether I was kind.

It was whether I would say a thing I could not be sure of, in order to make her feel better.