" I pause. "Choose quickly. I have limited patience this morning."
The mask slips. Only slightly — a tightening around her jaw, a brightness in her eyes that is not quite tears but is adjacent to them — and then it is back. But I have seen it. And she knows I have seen it.
"I was trying to protect myself," she says. Her voice is even. Remarkable, really, her control.
"You humiliated me. You fucked me in that bed and you looked at me like I was nothing and you said not for you and you expected me to simply absorb that and disappear."
"I expected you," I say, "to behave with the basic dignity your family name still affords you. Not to accuse me of assault because we both know you were dripping for it and you in fact seduced me"
"Your family name affords you considerably more," she says. Quiet. Sharp. "Everything you have ever wanted has been given to you, including my sister, and I—" she stops. The mask is working hard now. "I have never been given anything."
