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“You deserve—” He stopped. Started again, and heard himself splintering.

“Better … than this … Than me. I will not … I will not have you lie down with anything so unclean.”

The word was out before he heard it coming.

He saw it arrive. Across the angles of her face, as ruinous as a revoke called in front of the table. He let her keep the wrong meaning, because the right one was worse.

She would probably hear a judgment of her body, of the child, of what they had been doing.

But he heard lightning and unholy experimentation.

He did not correct her. Could not correct her.

He swallowed hard in the storm-light with his throat still open and her taste still in his mouth, and let the word do the work the wall had failed to do.

Unclean.

It landed on her like a blow he had not meant to strike and could not call back.

She froze. All of her, at once. The rose closed, petal by petal, over whatever was happening underneath.

She sat up and drew her disheveled hair over one shoulder. Folded her hands in her lap like a woman receiving a morning call.

“Unclean,” she repeated. No inflection at all. A player’s voice, giving nothing away. “I see.”

She did not see. She could not. That was the whole point. That she could never, ever see.

Standing there in the dark with his shirt on the floor, he understood that she had just dealt herself some other meaning for that word. Some wrong and wounding meaning.

And that he was going to let her keep it.

Because every correction led back to the cellar. Because the true thing was worse. Because he was a coward in his shame.

He picked up his shirt. His hands would not obey him. He dragged it over his head. The collar defeated him entirely. The tapes might as well have been water. He left it open at his ruined throat like a flag of surrender flown upside down.

Lightning offered her to him once more on his way to the door.

Sitting straight-backed against the bolster. Her chin level, and hands folded. Magnificent and white-faced and alone.

That shut face was worse than any weeping could have been.

He could not afford to look at her longer than the flash allowed.

The tall glass stood at the edge of his sight the whole way to the door. A pale figure too large for the room. He kept his eyes from it. He already knew what stood in it.

The latch. The corridor. The dark.

He went down through his own house like a thief.

The gallery. The ancestors kept to their frames. The great stair. The banister slid cold under his palm. His bare feet found the treads by memory. The hall opened round him at the bottom, black and enormous.

The long window over the door went blind-white with the next flash.

The drive. The elms thrashing. Rain in silver sheets across the park.

Then dark again.

The flags were cold as cellar stone under his feet. He crossed them fast.