He knows, with a certainty that makes him nauseous. When she flinches away from the brush of his fingers, he knows.
Please, don't do this.
"It was a mistake," she says.
"Is this Sinclair talking?"
I tried to warn you.
"No. Alfred, look at me."
"I'm learning to hear it now...
"I am."
"Believe me."
...when you're not telling the truth."
"I do."
"I don't feel for you the way I felt for René."
I thought you understood.
Her words are absolutely a betrayal, but not the one that she thinks. Even if he couldn't hear the lie in her voice, he has a perfect memory.
"We don't have to talk about what happened... but I wouldn't mind if it happened again."
He knows the shape of her voice around those words. How it rasped to a whisper, and the raindrops-on-hot-asphalt tang in the way she couldn't quite catch her breath. The pre-dawn blue of her fingers against his.
It's as real as the present every time.
He knows what she's doing. He hates it, and it's unfair, but he understands. What he can't bear is the way she's taking that fragile moment between them, a moment of joy and hope in all this bleakness, a moment when he believed his world could change - a perfect memory - and she's making it all a lie in retrospect.
That he can't forgive.