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“You knew there were others.”

He nodded just once.

“All this time.”

“Yes.”

“You watched me,” I said. “You watched me ask Sallow, in front of the entire orientation, whether there had ever been another first-gen.”

“I did.”

“And you said nothing. You didn’t correct him. You didn’t add one word.”

His face stayed calm, but his hand on the book had gone white across the knuckles, which was the only part of him that would confess. “I said nothing,” he said, “because a Fenwick who speaks becomes a Fenwick they can see. And a Fenwick they can see stops being useful, stops being a watcher and starts being watched.”

“Useful to who?” I asked. “The people who are already gone?”

“To the record.”

“The record is not everything, Linden.” My own voice had climbed and I let it. “It’s paperwork. It’s careful little paperwork kept by people who are watching other people drown and writing down the time of death. Sometimes the truth matters more than the archive that filed it.”

For the first time since I had met him, anger broke the surface of Linden’s face, but I knew it wasn’t directed at me. All the breakfasts and dinners we’d shared at least told me that much. He was angry because it was true.

“I know,” he said.

That stopped me flat.

He dropped his gaze to the book on the table, though he wasn’t ignoring me. “I know every single argument my family makes for staying quiet, because I was raised on them until they set under my skin like a second set of bones. Watch. Wait. Write. Survive long enough to pass the record on to the next member of the family. A dead witness helps no one. An erased witness helps no one. A seen witness becomes useless.” His voice had gone rougher than I had ever heard it, the smoothness worn off it entirely. “The unbearable part,” he said, “is that they’re right more often than they’re wrong.”

The anger in me faltered, not gone, but before I could think about it Linden lifted his gaze to meet my own as he spoke, “I decided before you arrived that I would not get close to you.”

That did something under my ribs I chose not to examine while he was watching. “Why?”

“Because you were exactly the kind of person,” he said, “my family would want me to watch and I knew watching you would make me feel like a coward when I didn’t step in, and I knew there would be a reason for me to step in at some point.”

I did not have anything to say to that. “How–”

“I saw your name in a margin before I saw you at the gates,” he said. “First-generation. Calder Street. Fire event. I knew what the academy would do with a situation like that. I knew what my family would expect me to do about it. Watch. Write. Keep back.”

“And then?”

“The library,” he said. “You spent an hour losing to the catalogue out loud, cursing at it under your breath. I told you about the old index because of how thorough you’d been with the new one. I knew you would just keep going until you found what you were looking for.”

Despite everything, my mouth twitched. “That was your first mistake,” I said.

“No.” His gaze held mine and he didn’t blink. “The first mistake was the way you looked at the name once you found it. Like a word could be evidence. Like it could still be evidence even after everyone else had gotten tired of reading it and let it go quiet on the page.”

The room went too still around us and he went on, lower now. “The second was Kit. On the cold steps behind the lecture hall. You let him hand you the worst part of himself, and then you didn’t make him comfort you for him handing it to you. I’ve never once seen anyone take a wound like that and react the way you did.”

I hadn’t even known he was there when I talked to Kit. I looked away, because that was too much. This wasn’t the romantic kind of too much but the seen kind, the kind that made me want to reach up and rearrange my own face before it could betray me to the person doing the seeing.

“And last night?” I asked, to the wall, to the ivy, to anywhere that was not him.

“Last night,” he said, “you gave a wolf the truth because you thought it couldn’t carry the truth anywhere.” His mouth tightened. “I carried it anyway.”

We sat with that. Or he sat with it. I was still standing, because sitting back down felt like admitting that world around me had shifted once again. “You should have told me,” I said. “Or at least stopped me.”

“Yes.” Immediate, too immediate to fight, with no defense hung on it at all.