"I never said you were." I kept going. Problem four, correct. Five through eight, all correct. Nine had a minor arithmetic error that didn't affect the final answer because the mistake cancelled itself out two steps later by sheer luck, and I circled it in red anyway so she'd know. Ten through fifteen, clean. Sixteen was wrong, but the setup was perfect and the error was in the final division step, the kind of careless mistake that happened when your brain got tired at 2 AM and numbers started swimming.
"Sixteen is wrong."
Her jaw tightened. I watched the muscle jump beneath the skin of her cheek, the same tell she'd had since our first session when wrong answers felt like confirmation that she was everything her mother said she was. But she didn't explode. She didn't throw the paper. She didn't stand up and storm out.
