"You did," she says, though there's more directness than offense in her tone, a faint hint of regret in her expression despite the blush and the embarrassment they're both sharing. "But you also thought of me as a different Harrowhark, at first." The twist of her mouth is rueful, before her expression smooths again. "The one you knew, when I had no concept of who you were at all."

His stillness breaks through the misery starting to descend over Harrow again, a distraction she pulls her focus towards knowing it has to be important. The longer he talks, long hesitancies and fractured sentences thrown out as they occur, the more each piece begins to take shape into something that feels distressingly like possibility. "The boundaries are thinner within the River," she says, taking on the pain of the reminder--Gideon aware, Gideon trapped inside her, Gideon safe but at a cost neither of them knew--and willing it to transform into hope, unworthy as she is of it. "If Gideon was there, present enough..."