She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. “If there’s going to be an explanation, I guess you can come in.” Her voice was toneless, pitched slightly higher with the crystalline, frozen state of her emotions.
She wanted to say, sharp and hard and with all the worry…
She still couldn’t think what to say. Captive. For a month. Oddly, her mind fixed on the fact that it also meant a month’s absence from school — and then something seemed to click.
“Why did no one know to tell me?” There was still that colourless clarity in her voice. “Am I a secret, Isaac? A shame? You wanted — ” She cut short, to try to reimpose the lack of emotion that shattered the last word. “You didn’t want to be a fling to me, so what am I to you, then?”
And then her throat closed up with incipient tears, and she couldn’t say anything more.