I had expected to feel something sharp and sweet, the pleasure of a wheel come full circle.

Instead I mostly felt tired, and a little sorry — not for Cassian, who deserved every ounce of what was arriving, but for Sylvie, who had believed a version of him just as I once had, who was about to learn the same lesson I’d learned, in the same cold way.

He had told her the same kind of lie he’d told me.

He had made her certain of a thing that wasn’t true, because certainty was the tool he used on women, the way another man might use charm or money.

She had worn my grandmother’s bracelet into that room like a trophy, and I had wanted to hate her for it, and I found, in the end, that I couldn’t quite manage it.

She wasn’t my enemy.