She cut herself off. She meant to say that’s not the problem, but wasn’t it? At any point when she’d been in Master Corbenic’s office, she could have run. That’s what the boys in her college whispered: that she’d wanted it. After all, why else would she have stayed? Why had she never pushed him away? Why had she never said that simple word, no? Trying to articulate the inarticulable fear she’d felt as she sat in his green office chair would lead her down the same road it always had. It would end with her mother telling her there was no such thing as monsters.
