"I know." He glanced at me -- brief, direct. "He doesn't know what you've done with it."
"He will."
"Yes." A pause. "He will."
The car turned onto their street. I watched him in profile -- the set of his jaw, the quality of his silence, the thing underneath the management that I had learned to read over two months of close proximity and careful attention.
He was angry.
Not at me. I had understood the distinction for weeks now: there was the anger he directed outward, which was cold and precise and didn't raise his voice, and there was the anger he directed inward, which was quieter and showed up only around the edges -- the jaw, the stillness, the measured breath.
This was the second kind.
"He smiled at you at the ball," Dominic said. Not a question.
I turned to look at him. "Yes."
"The smile he gave you that I didn't see."
I had not told him about that. I considered this for a moment.
"You saw it," I said.
"I saw it." He looked ahead at the street. "I see most things."
The car pulled up to the house. He got out first, which he almost never did -- he was meticulous about that, some habit of courtesy that felt too automatic to be performance -- and by the time I reached the front door he had already opened it.
I stopped in the doorway.
"He was testing whether you'd react," I said. "That's what the smile was for."
"I know what it was for."
"Did you?"
The word landed between them with a specific weight. Not accusation -- inquiry. I had learned the difference.
He looked at me for a long moment. The afternoon light came through the transom window above the door and fell across half his face, and I watched something move in his expression that I had not seen catalogued before: the thing underneath the management, closer to the surface than usual.
"He wanted to know if you mattered to me," Dominic said. "He got his answer." A pause. "I gave it to him. That was a mistake."
"Why?"
"Because it's information." His voice was level. "Information he will use."
I understood this. I understood it was true and that it was a liability and that he was correct about all of it.
I also understood, with the same clarity I brought to everything I actually admitted to myself, that what I had heard in those words -- underneath the strategy and the liability -- was something else. Something that was not a mistake in the way he'd said it.
I moved past him into the house.
He said, quietly, to the space behind me: "It wasn't something I could have helped."
I paused in the hallway.
I did not turn around.
"I know," I said.