His voice went through my flesh like the breeze of a winter morning. Not because it was cold, but because it was deep, as deep as mine, and it made me tremble imperceptibly. Like when I was a child. I nodded slowly.
“Andre told me about a woman. He says she knows everything.”
Of course. He was not going to tell me that he was glad I was alive, or to know my children, or that I had come back home. He was not even going to reproach me for having escaped his control. No, no. All that was secondary. He was more concerned about the common good than about us; I should have imagined it.
The rage swirled inside me like a spiral of fire.
But I waited in silence.
“And that she is ordinary,” he continued, speaking as if the word burned his tongue and disgusted him. “Alexander, did you tell every
