[gmw]

“Merde! You’ve changed, Bel. You lost your sense of humor while I was in the reformatory.”

“That’s not kind.”

“It’s better than me telling you that you never had a sense of humor. That would just hurt your feelings.”

Her heart believed him. He had a way of making people believe him, and she didn’t yet know how he did it. But her brain was not her heart, and Occam’s Razor suggested that if Bel was lying to six, he was lying to seven.

-- Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician (2018)