It occurred to him, lying awake afterward, that he had spent his whole life on the receiving end of that smile without ever once questioning it.
Gideon had always been the warm one, the easy one, the son who remembered birthdays and told the good stories at the table.
Ezra had envied it as a boy — that effortless charm he himself had never quite managed.
Only now did he understand that the charm and the crime were not two separate things.
They were the same instrument.
A man who can make a lie feel like reassurance, who can turn a smile on and off like a tap, who can stand in a hallway at midnight with stolen documents at his feet and still sound, to their sleepy father, like innocence itself — that man’s warmth was never the opposite of his deceit.