“There’s a difference.”

And it was a difference he had taught me, though he’d never meant to.

For six years Cassian had run his whole life on the principle that reality is whatever you can make people believe — that a wife is barren if you say she’s barren, that a marriage was abandoned if your lawyer writes that it was, that a lie becomes a fact the moment enough documents agree to it.

He had been so good at it that he’d stopped being able to tell the manufactured thing from the real one.

And that was precisely the blind spot that undid him.

Because I did not deal in belief.