Despite herself, she hears an echo — but of something she has yet to look in the face, and this moment isn't about her, so it's actually very reasonable of her to keep repressing that, this isn't the time to unpack it, a thing that she never intends to unpack. She sets that aside, and sinks into what he's telling her, absorbs the slow impact of wishing that it wasn't something that made so much sense.

She understands well enough to wish he didn't. It's hard not to only say that, and she's so close to him that he can almost feel against his skin the way her lips purse, holding something in,

“I know a little of reinvention,” she says, finally. Slower, and less deliberate, but: “All the things I told you— when I was first taken to the Inquisition, I thought I'd die if anyone knew them. And the worst things that I had ever imagined happening kept happening, and I kept surviving them,”

and no one can hurt her with the truth if she wears it boldly, she thinks, and sometimes it's true and sometimes it isn't. But,

slowly,

“You don't have to do as I do. I only— I want to be a place for you that's safe. Like you are. For me. I don't mind prising it out of you a little if you don't mind me doing it.”