The thing which flashes behind her eyes is very sharp, glancing off him like an arrow off a stone and landing somewhere behind him--a random fixed point on the stone wall, or a planter across the garden, or a chicken pecking at a crack in the paving stones.

Somewhere, high in her chest, a furious tangle is drawing itself into a tighter and tighter knot. It is lodged against her throat, pressed there so definitively that for a long time she can find no way of speaking around it until she mentally divorces herself from the shape of her own form. She imagines herself a different person, standing separate from this and looking down at these two figures in a dingy little courtyard garden. The one sitting on the edge of the planter says. light and breezy and without disappointment--

"There is no need to spare my feelings, Mister Ellis. You may just say when you're angry with a person."