POV: Iris Hartwell
Dinner was torture.
That evening, after Victor had left, Julian prepared food as though normalcy was still possible. Not because of the meal itself, Julian had prepared something deliberately neutral, something that wouldn't spark conversation. But because she had to sit across from him and maintain the fiction that this was normal. That they were still married in any meaningful sense. That the distance between them was anything less than absolute.
Iris cut her fish into precisely equal pieces and studied him.
His left eye. Did it twitch when he lied? She'd read somewhere that liars often had involuntary micro-expressions. That the nervous system betrayed deception before the conscious mind could control it. She watched his left eye throughout the entire meal. It didn't twitch. Which either meant he wasn't lying or meant he was too trained, too careful, too practiced at deception to show the tells.
