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“And mine’s fascinating.”

“Your absence is unusually consistent.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me.”

“It wasn’t praise.”

“I take what I can get. Poor upbringing.”

The pen moved again. My eyes opened before he told me to open them, and he noticed that too. He noticed everything, filed everything, and the filing had started to feel less like being studied and more like being buried a sentence at a time.

“Hands on the table,” he said.

My hands had already been on the table, so I laid my hands flat on the cold wood.

“Not braced.”

“I’m not braced.”

“You are pressing your fingertips into the grain hard enough to blanch the nails.”

I looked down. He was right, which was annoying, so I eased my hands.

“Better,” he said, and then frowned slightly as though he resented that he’d said it.

The room settled into ordinary quiet, rain and lamp hiss and the small sounds of a building shifting around us. His chair was still too far back, his gloves were still on, and half a page had filled with the record of my nothings.

I should have left it alone. I had never once in my life left a closed door alone. “What’s yours?”

His eyes came up. “Clarify.”

“Your discipline. I was told Veres manage memory. Somebody else said you remove obstacles, which is probably the version they leave out of the brochure. And Pelham looked like he swallowed a sword when he said your name. So what is it you actually do?”

The air changed. Not dramatically, Cormac was not a dramatic man, but it changed the way a room changed when someone laid a knife on the table and didn’t touch it.

“This is not about me.”

“No. It’s about whether I can trust the person tutoring me.”

His face did nothing, which was how I knew I’d landed. “Do you think trust is required?”

“For me to perform? Probably. For you to write things down? Apparently not.”

His gloved fingers came to rest on the pen, and that was when I saw it, the small imperfection at his right cuff. Leather rucked up over the wristbone, a sliver of pale skin almost showing under it.

He saw me see it.

He smoothed the glove down, and the movement was quick and exact and far too practiced to be vanity. Vanity was careless. This was defense.

“Memory,” he said. One word, set down like a border stone.

“Remembering it?”

“Managing it.”

“I already told you I knew that much.”

His mouth tightened a fraction. “Memory is not a fixed object. It can be accessed. Clarified. Strengthened, softened, severed, excised. In trained hands, a traumatic record can be rendered harmless. Dangerous knowledge can be contained. False recollection can be identified and removed. Continuity can be preserved.”