Jamie watched Kai pack his travel bag with the same careful attention she gave everything. She'd spent years learning to read him — the way he tilted his head when considering a lie, the pause before he committed to a plan, the specific tightness around his eyes when he was protecting someone. He reached into his coat and pulled out a pair of spectacles with shimmering lenses, the kind she'd seen him wear exactly twice in all their years together. He slid them on and turned to face her directly, and his expression went completely blank. Not neutral. Not guarded. Empty, like someone had wiped away everything she thought she knew about what his face meant. "I need you to stop watching me like that," he said, and the voice didn't match the blankness at all — it was gentle, almost apologetic. The portrait cracked. All those years of collected tells, the careful catalogue of what each gesture meant, and she'd missed the most important thing: he'd known the whole time. He'd been performing for her observer's eye, giving her exactly what she expected to see. She pulled out her notebook and crossed out three pages of notes about him in one long stroke. She followed him outside the wizardry school, past the towering spires and down to where the old wooden signpost marked the fork in the road. One broken arm pointed toward Crevassemaw. The other hung loose on its nail, pointing nowhere. Kai stopped there and took off the spectacles. "These let me see what people are looking for," he said. "You've been looking for patterns. I gave you patterns." He tucked them back into his coat. "The real tells are smaller. Harder. You won't find them by staring." Jamie looked at the signpost, at its weathered wood and the way snow had piled against its base over years of standing in the same spot. She'd walked past it a hundred times and never really seen it. Just filed it away as landmark, as scenery. She opened her notebook to a blank page and wrote one line: Watch for what you're not looking for. Kai smiled — a real smile this time, or maybe just another performance. She couldn't tell anymore. That uncertainty felt like progress.