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"Okay." I turn the heater vent away from me. "Then let's talk. I know you’ve been lying. You haven't worked at the clinic since June."

The car gets very quiet.

Lila looks straight out the windshield.

"So that's four months of shifts," I say. "That's lying every Saturday I covered the shop alone. That's you lying about being slammed."

"Maren."

"And last Friday you were standing in the alley behind the bakery handing something to a little old woman in an oatmeal cardigan. The day before that the same old woman was floating outside my window at two in the morning holding my pillow."

Her eyes close.

"And there was a piece of your coat burned into my front door."

That does it. Her whole face comes apart at once, all the muscles letting go together, as she starts crying.

"I want you to tell me it's a coincidence," I say, and my voice is shaky. "I've had all night to think of one. Please. Someone could have pulled a thread off you in a checkout line. Say that."

She doesn't say it.

"Say it, Lila."

"I can't lie to you today." She's got both hands over her mouth. "I've done it every day for three years and I can't do it today."

And there it is. Not a hesitation. Just a woman finally telling the truth.

"Three years?"

"Yes."

"Tell me the rest. Say it out loud in your own words or I'm never going to believe any version of it."

She wipes her face with the back of her wrist the way I’ve watched her do a hundred times across a table with two glasses of wine between us.

"I'm with them," she says. "The Veiled Hand. I have been since I was nineteen."

"And the day we met," I say.

"It wasn't just a day we met."

"What?"

"There wasn't just a day we met." She looks at me then, and her eyes are ruined. "There was a day I was sent to you."

The bakery. The line for coffee. Her turning around with two cups because they'd made an extra by mistake, and me standing there in a wet coat believing it.

"How long have they known about me?"

"Longer than you've been alive," she says. "They've been watching your bloodline since before your mother was born. I'm not the first one they sent."

I'm aware of a lot of small things all at once.

The foil loaf sweating on the console. The fact that she took a job at a clinic she never had, for four months, so I'd have somewhere to picture her.

Three years of pizza with mushrooms on my half.

She never learned my order. She didn't care enough to learn my order. But, she needed to learn everything else.