He would call it exactly what it was, in the meeting the next morning and in the record that followed, because the first step in fixing a thing is refusing to let the people who broke it rename it into something forgivable.

Chapter 13 — Twelve Years

Bea looked at the floor.

Wescott noticed that her eyes glistened but she didn’t let the tears fall — a woman who had spent a lifetime saving them for when no one was watching.

There was a whole history written in that small refusal, and Wescott, who had learned to read people across eleven years of walking his own floors unannounced, read it clearly.

Bea did not hold her tears because she was cold, or because she felt nothing; she held them because she had learned that in rooms like this one, tears were a currency that got spent against you.