[Something comes over her expression, then — a half-smile that never reaches her eyes, and a gaze that fixes itself somewhere in the middle distance — but the most defining part of it all is the way that there's nothing about it that suggests a lie. It's not the kind of smile that pretends to be something it's not; it's too automatic, too fixed, like the facial equivalent of tension seizing up someone's shoulders in a moment of impending apprehension.

It's the kind of expression born of resilience, stubbornness, and perhaps even spite. It's the sort of expression that looks carefully controlled, so as not to allow itself to shift into a different one.]

He likes to remind me that he's better than me. Usually something like this happens when it starts to seem like I'm forgetting.