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"It became yours the moment she used it to needle you in public."

"She threw it at you. I was just standing close enough to catch the splash."

"You looked at the door for the rest of the meal."

"I was tired."

"Jade."

"Don't," she said, and something had changed in her voice, gone thinner and harder at once. "Don't tell me what my own face was doing."

I held both hands up, palms out, the closest thing to a retreat I had left.

"That's not what I meant."

"Then say what you meant."

Here was the part I had rehearsed the least, because every version of it in my head sounded worse out loud than it had walking across the yard.

"I meant that none of us told you. Not because it's a secret. Because it never came up, and once it hadn't come up for long enough, none of us thought to bring it up on our own."

She went very still.

"You decided it wasn't relevant."

"We didn't decide anything. It simply never seemed urgent enough to raise."

"That's a decision, Corian. You just made it without noticing you were making it."

I felt the ground shift under that and couldn't immediately say why.

"I'm not following."

"Four people lived beside me every day for weeks and agreed, without a single conversation about it, that I didn't need to know something that changes how people in this city look at you. At us. You withheld it because it was easier not to."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" She wrapped the strip of cloth around her knuckles, hard and fast, not looking at me while she did it.

"The Citadel decided for years what I was allowed to know about my own life. Every time somebody above me, judged a piece of information not urgent enough to raise, I lost something I never got to ask for back. I thought I'd left that behind when I walked out of Janus's office."

"I'm not the Council."

"You just used their exact reasoning."

That one struck harder than I wanted it to, mostly because some ugly, honest part of me recognized the honesty of it. I opened my mouth to argue and found nothing underneath the argument worth saying.

"I wasn't trying to keep anything from you," I said instead, which was true, and which I understood the moment it left my mouth was not going to help me.

"You just did it anyway. Without trying. That's worse."

"I didn't want to add more weight onto you. You'd only just started finding your feet here, and I didn't see the use in loading you down with something that doesn't touch your life."

Her hands stopped on the wrap.

I watched her face close the way a door closes when someone on the other side has decided the conversation is finished, quiet and total and final.

"You didn't want to load me down."