Maybe if he'd taken her off-guard with it, she'd have had a different reaction — if there'd been no one here to compare him to, if she'd known less about all of them — maybe then she'd have found it more immediately shocking than she does, instead listening to him confirm aloud something she'd suspected, contemplatively, earlier than now. Maybe she'd have said something thoughtlessly insensitive,

although maybe not, as attuned as she is to him in this moment. What she does say is,

“It's still a part of you,” quietly, “but the ... delineation. You mark it so particularly,” sorcerer, surgeon, farmboy. “Like you were different people. But I can see...”

Her fingers trace a line from his hand along his forearm: “The connective tissue between them. How one led to the next. There are parts of you that I couldn't, mmmm, that I didn't understand how they fit. I misread you, sometimes, because of that. ” She says it with such matter of fact certainty; that she had been revising her understanding of him with unfurling context, that she can see the spaces where she guessed wrong with too little to work off of. “I'd bet,”

thoughtfully,

“at that point it was just easier to do the thing you'd been doing anyway. And close that door.”