Chapter 166

• Julian stayed quiet for a while after I finished reading. I could feel his eyes on me, but he didn’t push for a reaction. The headline sat between us like something we had both agreed not to touch, though we were looking straight at it. The photograph on the screen was so familiar to me I could recall what I had been thinking when it was taken, and it had nothing to do with arrogance or dismissal. I had been tired that night, smiling at someone I barely knew because that was what the evening required. It was strange how a frozen image could be bent into whatever shape someone wanted.
• “They are hoping you will get angry enough to speak,” he said at last, his voice calm but deliberate. “If you say something, they will pull one line out and make it mean the opposite. If you say nothing, they will tell people your silence means guilt. That is how this works.”
• I kept my hand over the phone without realizing it, as though I could keep the words from spreading by covering them. “Then the only way to win is to change the game,” I said. “They cannot twist what they do not see coming.”