She was reporting, as a witness reports, what she had walked into when she came to look at my father’s chosen world, and the report was simply true, and a true thing stated without anger leaves a man nothing to push against but himself.”

She was not trying to wound me.

That was the thing that made it unbearable.

There was no cruelty in her voice, no triumph, none of the sharpened edge that my rivals put into every word they aimed at me.

She was simply telling me what she had found, gently, the way you tell someone bad news you wish were not true.

“That’s what I found, Bennett,” she said.