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I ate a few bites without tasting any of it, then went to my room.
Behind me I could hear my mother's familiar disappointed muttering and Lily's perfectly timed contributions to it, low and plausible and impossible to argue with.
Bryce came in carrying a small bowl of strawberries.
I ignored him.
"Zara, are you still angry with Lily? You didn't say a word to her at dinner. She's going to go home and spiral."
Once, I would have shouted back at that. Was I supposed to not be angry? She'd tampered with my university application, she'd taken my relationship, my mother wouldn't let me call the police or even raise my voice at her, and now I was expected to manage Lily's anxiety?
But that was before Syria. Before Libya. Before the specific kind of clarity that comes from nearly dying several times.
I didn't respond.
Bryce took my silence as an accusation against himself and started explaining again.
"I always knew, you know, that your mum hated London. I knew you'd picked LSE to get away from her. Lily didn't want to see your relationship with Diana completely break down. She thought she was helping when she changed the application."
Lily's helping. Changed my UCAS application without my knowledge. Replaced my Economics offer from LSE with a journalism programme at a provincial college two hundred miles from home.
He kept going.
"Even if we'd both got into LSE back then, I would have told you to change your mind. The distance from Diana — it wasn't good for either of you."
I said, very quietly, "Did you intentionally tank your own grades so you could stay and keep Lily company?"
He stopped mid-sentence.
He had no idea how I knew. He'd never looked clearly enough at Lily to understand that the sweet, helpless version he thought he knew wasn't the whole picture.
After university, once she no longer needed my mother's money, Lily had sent me a series of messages. Detailed ones. All the things Bryce had done while he was supposedly committed to me: the amusement parks he took her to on weekends, the cinema trips, the seaside visits I'd always asked him about and been told he was too busy for. How he'd used curtains in hotel rooms to block the window when I called to check in, so I couldn't tell where he was.