Chapter 14: What we don't say
Bobby should've noticed how fixated Rogue was on the news of the 'cure'.
But he hadn't, and so here he was at a clinic in the city, scanning the line outside for a streak of white hair.
He found John instead.
"Same old Bobby," John said, emerging from the crowd, eyes cold, sneering. "Always too afraid of a fight."
Bobby stared, finding it harder to shake off seeing him in person as opposed to the footage on the news. It was easier to resent a ghost. It still felt like yesterday they'd been goofing off in the back of Storm's science class, their biggest tension that Bobby was jealous of Logan and wouldn't admit it, even to John.
"Same old John," he said. "Angry and blind."
John glared back, but it felt wrong, somehow. His hair had been dyed at some point and he'd spiked it away from his face, swapped his old leather jacket for a utility jacket over a hoodie. Everything about the way he was dressed felt defensive. More layers between him and the world. His face was tight, but there were deep circles under his eyes. John had always had a distance to him, but now he looked like a man who hadn't slept well in months.
"Shut u—"
"You know what, no," Bobby said, stepping closer to get in his face. "Because I get that you're mad at the world and your family sucked and you're feeling powerful now, but all you've actually accomplished is hurting the people who care about you."
The crowd was still chanting around them. John's face remained cold and unreadable.
"I don't know what after school special you think this is," he said, voice low, a little too empty. "But I'm not you, Bobby. What people? There's no family out there missing their arsonist son."
Bobby shook his head, deflated, wishing he knew what to say. It wasn't like his family missed him now either. He could still picture them in that upstairs window, huddled around Ronnie's figure as though he was the son who needed them.
He suspected he'd always known it was how they'd react. They were nice enough people, if you operated within their expectations. If you didn't draw too far outside the lines. His parents had been proud of him, even, growing up. It was why he'd been happy not to tell them, to let them believe what they wanted, to keep his universes separate.
He hadn't spoken to them since that afternoon. When Logan had been shot right in front of them. When John had taken one look at the guns still pointed at them, at Celia, and lit the whole place on fire.
Bobby had a lot of time to think about that afternoon, afterward, once the terror had faded. When he'd realized what might've happened was much worse. When he'd wondered why it was John, of all of them, who had acted without a moment's hesitation, only John who had already known what he would put himself on the line for.
"Are you being dense on purpose?" Bobby said, all of it at the back of his mind, still unable to tell what feeling was at the wheel—shock, anger, something heavier. "You had us."
Instinct was telling him John's indifference was a bluff, no matter how seamless it sounded. It was not possible for his first real friend to have gone from John—who, sure, acted like an indifferent ass but whose best qualities were just well guarded secrets—to an actual indifferent ass with just a haircut and some crappy new clothes.
"I mean, I get it. You were never big on the Professor's whole mentality. I'm not an idiot. But I thought things were fine. I thought—" Bobby cut off. I thought you were my friend. I thought we would always be on the same side, he thought, but instead said, "I mean you had Celia, didn't you?"
He hadn't really meant to say it out loud. He'd never been in the habit of asking John about Celia—they had always operated in some private world only accessible to the two of them and the closest Bobby had come to understanding it was when he'd seen the look on John's face the night she'd shown up in the middle of the night—but it had spilled out with that honest ring of a thought that had been banging around for a while.
The smirk vanished, and Bobby watched something turn in John's eyes before he looked away.
"Yeah, well. I'm sure she's fine," John said, looking at the building instead of Bobby, his voice just missing the right notes. "Everyone always knew she was too good for me. Now she can…also know that."
It was like he'd meant to say "move on" but not been able to stomach the words. Bobby watched as John arranged his face again into condescension, as though that would cover that he'd flinched. That the mask had slipped just a hair.
Bobby thought of Celia's eyes hard and downcast for that flight back, when even Rogue wasn't sure what to say. How closed off she was even months after, keeping mostly to herself, coaxed out for a few minutes and then disappearing just as quickly, like a shutter closed. Even after some of the younger kids had found their way into her orbit, it felt a little like she wasn't all there. There was a new wariness in her eyes when guys delivering pizza tried to hit on her, an edginess that now accompanied old habits—frowning at a book next to Jones while he watched shark videos, sitting motionless out on the terrace with tea.
She'd stopped walking in the backyard entirely and he didn't know why. Even once she'd started her borderline obsessive training regimen, disappearing into the basement for hours at a time in a routine that seemed to return her a little more to herself, he never saw her set foot in the backyard again. She would just sit in a chair on the patio and stare at it. He didn't even understand what had happened the other night between her and Warren, only that he'd been coming back in from skating with Kitty and seen her leaving the kitchen with such a scowl that neither of them stopped her.
It felt like all he'd done for the past year was slowly miss more and more signals from the people he cared about, slowly lose grasp on this new Xavier's, ironically just as it became the only family he had left. It had always been Bobby and Rogue, and John and Celia. Bobby and John, and Rogue and Celia. But she was his friend too.
He could still picture how she'd looked on the jet home. It was the closest to that empty, void as a tomb look she'd had when they first met her that he'd seen since she arrived. Like the girl who had John so wrapped around her finger that he started attending all of his classes and stopped actively alienating everyone at meals was gone.
"You think so, huh?" Bobby said. "Well, I guess you would know best."
John frowned. Bobby shook his head, mouth twisted, a suspicion creeping back to life at the back of his mind.
"You know, John. For a smartass, you can be such an idiot sometimes," he said, turning away.
Behind him, John stared as the crowd closed behind Bobby's back, feeling heavier than before. He glanced toward the building he had been sent to deal with, grimaced and shot an arm out, launching a ball of flame through the nearest window.
He'd waited to see that the side of the building looked empty. It was something he could never admit but also couldn't stop doing. Picking a part of the building that was public enough but unoccupied. All hysteria, no death. All panic while staying carefully on one side of the line that he'd drawn internally for reasons he preferred to avoid facing.
Reasons that as he walked away swam right back to the surface with the memories he'd been trying to keep at bay. Failing, with laughable consistency, since the day he'd left.
The problem was he remembered too much.
He could remember the shape of her too well, the line of her neck, her fingers tracing lines on his arms, only to shake awake at night to find himself alone in a tent in the middle of a forest, wondering how she was sleeping, if she'd found someone to sleep next to who didn't force her to share fiery nightmares. If she was in somebody else's arms somewhere, learning someone else's language, forgetting him. He scanned crowds half-expecting to see her features among the faces, watchful but wary, unexpectedly closed off and still somehow instantly comforting, familiar, home. Every blue-eyed stranger he passed in the street could almost be her for that first split-second, until they were inevitably just a stranger's eyes and not Celia's—bright with laughter at something he'd whispered as the others studied, his hands brushing hers under the table; red-rimmed and wounded in that last moment before he turned away toward the trees.
He didn't know that fight would be their last. He'd walked angry into the mountain and by the time he ran into Magneto and Mystique with their helicopter and an ultimatum, the anger had boiled away to the despairing certainty that he'd finally gone too far, finally burned the last bridge. And without it, there was nothing waiting for him back at Xavier's.
He'd convinced himself at the time that it would be easier to see it through, and he kept trying to prove he was committed by overzealously throwing himself into his role, but it was thin and he knew it. He suspected Mystique could tell and it was why she eyed him with annoyance. She'd started strolling by his tent wearing Celia's face, irritated he could always tell it was her but clearly enjoying whatever reaction she saw in his face too much to stop.
He had assumed that joining the fight would mean freedom and a fresh start. He had always thought of himself as someone with nothing to lose, but every time he played over that moment in his mind, when he caught Celia's eyes on the mountain and then turned his back, he knew that had changed.
It didn't matter whether he was John in hand-me-down clothes or Pyro in combat boots and a new haircut...they were the same him no matter how he pretended otherwise. And they were both miserable.
Celia POV:
My new room still felt empty.
It was next door to Rogue's and largely identical in terms of content (to any Xavier's room really—it's not like we typically came with a lot of assets): desk stacked with books, articles of clothing only partway into drawers, shoes by the door, my only real jacket—a warm, soft, dark thing Giselle had dropped off, stating that she'd prefer her only grandchild survive the winter—on its hook.
What I didn't have much of were photos. Given how isolated my life before had been, there hadn't been much in the way of memorialization. My mother had taken some photos growing up but I had left them behind in the house I didn't plan to go back to. Something told me the Professor probably had them stashed in a storage unit somewhere for the "right time", and I wondered if this was information he'd ever passed on to anyone else. In any case, that time didn't seem to be coming any time soon.
Giselle had made a copy of the one photo she had of me with her and my mother as a two-year-old. The other two were courtesy of Jubilee, who had received a camera in Secret Santa her first winter at Xavier's, been a menace for several months after, and then promptly forgotten it for her next obsession, until she'd barged in one day and taped them to my wall without asking.
One was of the group hanging out in the backyard on a weekend, John and Bobby play fighting, Rogue with a gloved arm around me while I stared, a little clumsily but with a kind of caught-off-guard happiness that always struck me as unfamiliar on my face. There was something near to hopeful about that girl glancing at the camera, utterly different from the one who hid in the bath tub with her mother when her dad came home, who had pleaded and panicked and healed and done little else. The other was one of John and I in the living room that I couldn't bring myself to throw away. Our heads were bent just slightly toward each other, despite the book open in my lap and his lighter open in his hand. I don't know why I kept it. Looking at it always hit me as equal parts validating and painful, like a rumor I'd heard about finally appearing in print.
Despite my best efforts to strip this room down to its bones upon moving into it, things had crept in again. A cream-colored knit blanket from Giselle's visit (purchased, not homemade—she'd been quick to assure me that her talents were not in crafting and I should adjust my expectations accordingly), scraps of material Jubilee had left behind, lists of groceries Storm wanted help picking up, a pile of hair ties, an Algebra textbook for middle schoolers, the soft leather bag Giselle had given me on my birthday, shrugging with feigned indifference and claiming there was no one else for her to spend money on.
It was a little like me and Rogue's old room, that way, in a way that I'd come to accept. I'd walked into this place with nothing, but gradually even my half of the room had filled with trinkets from school trips, doodles from class, things John dragged in from outside. After Alkali Lake, I might have purged the room completely, bitter and wanting a room as empty as I'd felt, but over time, this place had snuck back in. Discarded objects tracked in by younger students looking for a nightlight or a braid, Jubilee's latest crafts, Rogue's latest romance novels.
This place seemed physically incapable of letting me stew for long without disruption.
And of course, somewhere under the bed, where I was hopeful no one would ever find it, was the box of John's things I'd removed from the hall closet before Jubilee could use them for target practice.
Maybe I was nothing to him, but no one needed to know what he still was to me.
When Bobby came back from the clinic, he lied about it and said he'd been at the grocery store. But I knew. And I'd seen the flames on the television screen so I had a more than reasonable guess as to what former friend of his was to blame. Former friend of his. Denial: it's all in the wording.
"We needed milk," Bobby said, passing me with his eyes low, notably empty-handed.
I didn't ask, but I did catch Grace make a hasty swerve away from him into another hallway, and since I'd been having a relatively emotionally stable day for once, that could only mean one thing.
"Celia!" someone else was saying.
I'd been staring at the wall by the staircase, remembering the first time I'd seen Scott and Logan pretend not to fight over Jean.
I turned and it was Warren, looking fresh from a J. Crew catalog in clean jeans and a button down made of probably the most expensive fabric I had ever seen. I smiled, feeling awkward.
It had been nice to be able to talk to someone freely—someone without their own back story at Xavier's and their own relationship baggage to take care of. That said, I was beginning to feel like maybe making out with the new guy had been a mixed signal. Also, that it was one I was managing poorly.
"Warren, hey," I said, filing Bobby's mood under things to dwell on later. "How's it going?"
He nodded. "Oh fine. Just catching up on the latest fires."
I nodded back a little too slow, conscious we both knew who was likely behind them.
"Listen, sorry again about the other night—" I started, before he was waving me off with one hand.
"It's fine," he said, "I understand. I mean I can't say I aim for women to immediately burst into tears after kissing me, but I do understand."
I wrinkled my nose. "I did not 'burst into tears'."
He gave me a pitying look and my blood simmered with annoyance.
"Whatever happened," he continued, in a gentle tone of voice that sank the last of any regrets I had about not liking him. "It's fine. I don't know what the deal is with your ex but I'm not exactly in any position to judge."
Which was an odd thing to say, considering he certainly seemed to be doing so.
"I spent my entire life telling my family I wanted one thing more than anything and then when it came time, jumped out a window."
He nodded to the televisions screen in the den, which was replaying the latest interview about the cure, his father's carefully poised suit in an armchair across from some morning news interviewer, the phrase "They're Just Like Us" crawling across the bottom.
I wasn't totally convinced of the parallel. Neither John nor I were big on jumping out windows where stairs were available. Warren had obviously never planned an exit strategy in his life.
"If you change your mind," Warren said—and he must have been saying something else while I wasn't listening but it was hard to feel that I'd missed much—"I'm around."
He smiled slightly like he thought I would, somehow both polite and condescending. I nodded back knowing that I wouldn't.
As if I could ever change my mind after being accused of 'bursting into tears' by a man who wore trench coats indoors.
John POV:
"We need to talk about Celia Lange," said Magneto, eyes flitting briefly toward Pyro.
"What about her?" John said, too quickly and too taken by surprise to realize it. "She's not part of this."
"Ah nor is she exactly who she says she is," said Magneto, forehead lowered in that customary signal before one of his speeches.
Mystique's smirk widened at his side, already pleased.
John's tendency to volunteer frequently for Magneto's missions, to throw himself into the fray with borderline reckless enthusiasm, was more than a little annoying when you were around him often enough to see him brood in the time in between. More than once, she'd considered prodding at him more directly, but she'd settled for the occasional stroll by his tent wearing the appearance of the blonde from the jet, watching the emotion flicker across his face. A reminder when she found him getting especially tiresome that she knew his weaknesses, knew something about him that she strongly suspected was more permanent than the flamethrower he now wore.
"Celia Lange, as I understand she is now calling herself, is in fact Celia Esmond," Magneto continued, tastefully ignoring the clear satisfaction on Mystique's face. "Daughter of Damian Esmond, though she seems to have taken her mother's name…the human."
Even Mystique noticed that the way he said "human" wasn't quite what it usually was. His tone caught only halfway to the disgust he usually reserved for that section of the population, hesitating. There was uncertainty there.
John shrugged, trying not to feel like that itch he'd been thinking more and more about wasn't finally being peeled from his skin. Celia had always had secrets and he'd always known it. He'd let her have them because it felt more important to keep her. The inexplicable validation that he might be important to someone. Someone who fit in, who was well-liked, who should never have given him the time of day but was somehow also the person always in his corner. He had assumed that she would leave him eventually. He just hadn't been in a rush to chase her away.
He'd known though, when she showed up the night of the storm without a word, shaking in the hallway outside his door, pressed into the corner of the doorframe with a blank stare into the hallway as though she couldn't stand for her back to be unwatched for even a second. He'd known she was already too much to let go of, that he was already in trouble. When she did leave him, it wouldn't matter that he'd seen it coming, or that he'd predicted it would happen from the very start. It would crush him.
Maybe that was why he'd left first. As though that had helped.
Magneto glanced at him for a moment, then turned to the gathered crowd as though telling a story.
"Damian Esmond was an incredibly powerful mutant, capable not only of altering one's dreams but of manipulating their waking reality."
"Like Alkali Lake," said Quill, who was entirely too interested in the conversation for John's liking.
"Precisely. Only much more powerful. And more practiced. He was an adult man with a wife and child, not a boy with a deranged father already half-suspect of him…and think of the damage Jason was still able to do. The boy murdered his own mother by delusion. Damian was well known for many years, a shadow on the fringes of talk about mutants, a bad dream that haunted the most respectable suburbs. They called him the Sandman."
There was an audible shifting in the crowd as people recognized the name. Faces paled noticeably. John couldn't say he knew the name, though there'd been a different set of nightmares to contend with in the homes he'd grown up in than the rest.
"Damian was responsible for the torture and death of countless people—mostly humans, but mutants as well—for what was most likely the majority of Ms. Lange's childhood," Magneto continued. "Not the least of these was the repeated torture of her mother, Anna Lange, the only woman Damian Esmond ever loved."
Magneto trailed off thoughtfully while John tried to re-focus what he'd imagined was Celia's family. A sadistic father who hated and tortured humans. A mother repeatedly his favorite victim. When they'd talked about home, Celia had mostly only ever talked about her mother and how hard she had worked. He remembered that she was a nurse. And that Celia would do anything for her.
He couldn't help noticing Celia wasn't included on the list of women Damian loved and thought it seemed an especially rude oversight.
"Anna Lange saved the lives of a number of mutants and subtly made arrangements for the care of hundreds of mutant children made orphans by attacks in the neighborhood," Magneto said solemnly. "In fact, it's possible she cared for many of them herself—she and her daughter. She was an illogically empathetic human, but the mutant community owes her a great debt. It is a shame that she died."
There was silence for all of a second. The Brotherhood tended not to deal well with silences.
"So how'd she die?" It was Quill again; Arclight shoved him hard in the side but looked hopefully at Magneto for the answer.
He pursed his lips for a moment.
"She ran off a staircase and landed on her head."
The crowd shifted uncomfortably.
"It is my belief that Anna was subjected to her husband's manipulations regularly, and that the visions often—as with Jason's mother—involved seeing her daughter in some grave danger with the intent to lead her to harm herself," said Magneto. "That she remained alive for so long during some of the Sandman's worst massacres suggests that the young Ms. Lange spent a great deal of her childhood saving her mother's life."
"Listen, there are…some things I haven't told you," she'd said slowly, eyes wide and shoulders shaking. He'd wondered if she'd noticed that she was trembling while he held her face in his hands, that her breathing was uneven.
John watched leaves rustle on the forest floor, silently turning this over in his head. It fit. Too well. The more he thought about it, the more badly he wished he could go back. He needed her to be a hallway's walk away again. He needed to wind his fingers through her hair and tell her she could tell him anything and mean it. He needed to hold her face in his hands and tell her she was safe. He needed to go back to the Drakes' front porch and understand what it would mean to her.
"In the end, Anna Lange fell from a staircase in their home, chasing something that wasn't there. Damian shot himself in the head moments after, feet away from their then 17-year-old daughter."
There was another pause while this sunk in. Even Mystique was beginning to look distinctly uncertain. She'd been looking forward to seeing John humbled, to some dirt on one of the prodigal Xavier's crowd, but this was making his ex-girlfriend's story too familiar for her to take pleasure in.
"It is unclear whether Damian truly spared her or whether she drove his power back on him somehow with her own," Magneto was saying. "I find it hard to believe he spontaneously decided to kill himself after taking so many lives for so many years. But it's possible that Anna's death was the last straw. At the very least, his abilities had no effect on the girl. My hope in sending Callisto to New York was to better determine the extent of her power."
John thought of Celia, quiet and shaking with nervousness she denied before every Danger Room session, during which she largely ran a lot and shouted directions to the others, unable to do much more on her own, or maybe just unwilling to try.
He had wondered whether it was really a limit on her power or whether there was some other, unspoken reason why she refused to consider her own powers for longer than a moment, to think about learning more about them, training with the professors, expanding on them. If he'd noticed her reluctance to talk about them or to strategize, as the other students sometimes did over meals, he'd liked her smiling with relief at him too much to ever join anyone else in questioning her.
Callisto cleared her throat, sensing her part in the narrative had come.
"She has more power than we thought, and it's growing stronger. She doesn't have anything like full-scale psychological manipulation, although she could probably accomplish it if she wanted." Callisto stopped for a second and took a breath. "It's confusing, because her power should take the same form as the Sandman's, but instead she emits powerful energy blasts and a constant defensive immunity to psychic influence. It's like all that power is just coming out a different way. She can experience and potentially influence dreams though—the mind's defenses are weaker when asleep. The healing power comes from someplace else, I think. She's easily a class 4. But the most reluctant one I've ever seen."
John fought back a smirk. Of course she was.
Magneto nodded as though Callisto had recited the weather and not the latest of the most jarring news John had heard in over a year.
"The healing power may be connected in some way from her mother's mother. Giselle Lange," he said, a rueful smile tugging at the corner of a smirk as though remembering an old friend…or foe, it was somehow constantly impossible to riddle out which with him. "The legendary 'Angel of the Battlefield' who healed Allied soldiers in World War II."
Magneto's eyes fell to John, who was staring distantly at the trees.
"What a remarkable pedigree," he said, voice amused and dry. "The genes to either save thousands of lives or murder us all in our sleep and she continues to choose mediocrity."
"You don't know her," John said, without thinking.
Mystique watched him carefully. Magneto just tipped his head, knowing smile on his lips.
Neither do you, John thought, feeling not for the first time that he was totally out of his depth.
"It is curious that no one's sure what happened that night," Magneto continued, almost as an afterthought. "There is some acquired footage, though there's no sound. It seems Damian had more than one way to keep tabs on his wife and daughter while he was away. If you'd like to see…"
John didn't. He still remembered how long she'd been shaking when she appeared at his room that night. How empty her face looked all those times he'd caught her staring somewhere in the middle-distance.
"Though it's not clear whether he killed himself or whether she compelled him to."
Even as he said it, Magneto looked only vaguely interested, as though it was a theory he was being charitable to indulge.
"Based on my initial impression of the girl," he said, " I think it's rather the former."
"It was me."
John kept thinking about how raw and vulnerable her face had looked as she gripped onto his forearms that night like she could think of nothing else in the world that would keep her grounded.
He'd never felt so dangerously important.
"I think he knew that I could do it. I think he knew the whole time."
Again, too many of the pieces fit. Her dad the serial killer, keeping both women alive? Or keeping one alive to torture and the other alive to experiment on, see how far she could be pushed, see what might finally push her over the edge?
"He knew that I was in there."
John didn't say a word.
It wasn't that he had any secret nostalgic allegiance for the X-Men. He still couldn't think of the Professor's dream team with much more than resentment. To sit there idle as the world went to shit? To stand by and wait for the perfect opportunity as politics turned to neighborly genocide? In a mansion funded by a bored rich guy who woke up one day telepathic. It was an idealism he wasn't built for.
He could never scrape together the patience to be satisfied with it. If it hadn't been for Celia and Bobby, he probably would have run away much sooner.
They existed for the brochure-friendly portraits of mutation, like Bobby or Rogue. They existed for people like Kitty, who wanted to save the world a little bit but more importantly be seen as in the right while doing so. They didn't exist for delinquents with track records and destructive streaks. They hadn't even meant to pick him up at all. He was a scrap picked up by accident, an afterthought, a constant smudge on the mansion's aesthetic.
It was what had bothered him so much about Celia at first. Because he'd assumed with one look at her that she would shuffle herself neatly into the pack of X-Men's next generation—charming, intelligent, with the kind of power innocuous enough not to threaten society and the kind of face it would never question.
But then she'd announced that her parents were dead in that everything-is-empty voice and he'd felt the bottom drop out of his stomach because she was so much closer to the kind of trouble he knew. And his immediate fear was that they would discover what she really was and ruin her for it.
"If it was her, then that changes things," Quill was saying. "If she's really got that kind of power hidden away, shouldn't we be trying to capture her for our own purposes? She'd be invaluable. A mutant who can influence minds? Think how incredible that would be. She could turn the entire Senate in a moment, no questions asked. She could have every scientist working on 'the cure' lined up on the rooftops."
She would hate that. John thought instantly. And it would be you who put her there, right into one of the nightmares she ran to you from.
Magneto looked as though he were weighing this possibility with more thought.
"True. And knowing Charles, it wouldn't surprise me if he'd kept any notion of the girl's potential under wraps even among his own." He cast a knowing glance in the always-silent Jean's direction.
John hated that he kept calling her "the girl" like she wasn't the same age as most of his own followers. Legally an adult and long acted more like one than this mob camped out in a forest in stolen tents.
"Where do you think we'll be?" "Somewhere with central air and electricity."
He almost laughed.
"Pyro," Magneto said suddenly, so that for a moment, John felt like he had fallen asleep in the back of class again. "Surely if she had any inkling of this kind of power, you would have noticed."
John was working hard to wipe his mind clean to keep his expression neutral. It hardly mattered, since the older man cared more about hearing himself speak than listening for lies. But Jean watched him. Silently, curiously. She must have been able to see everything he knew. But she didn't say a word.
"Maybe she mentioned getting into her father's head that fateful night over dinner and a movie?"
If he were in a better mood, he might have laughed at the idea that anyone in that mansion went on normal dates. As it was, he tracked Mystique's more watchful expression out of the corner of his eye and shifted his weight, pretending to think this over.
"It was me." "It's ok if it was."
He still meant it. This filling in of the blanks had left him feeling a little stupid, more than a little itchy with regret. But it changed nothing. He would have forgiven her anything she had done to stay alive.
He shrugged.
"Nah," he said, looking Magneto dead in the eye with a nonchalance identical to any other comment he'd made as Pyro, to the mask he liked for people who weren't her. "I think it's unlikely."
And then he shut his mouth because to say anything else felt like it would draw more suspicion, and held his breath until the crowd grumbled and shrugged and moved on, accepting as fact that their original assumptions about a person they had never met were true.
"It's ok if it was." And she'd stopped shaking.