This was not that face.
This woman was looking at me the way you look at a stranger who has walked up and accused you of a crime in a language you barely speak — startled, alarmed, scanning her own memory for what on earth could have brought this on, and finding nothing.
There is a difference between the fear of being exposed and the fear of being wrongly accused, and though they can look similar for a second, they are not the same, and some animal part of me clocked the difference even as my mouth kept going.
But I was too far into the fall to catch myself.
I had built the catastrophe too fast and too completely, and a person mid-catastrophe does not stop just because a detail doesn’t fit.
She revises the detail.