She smiled softly, masking the thrum of suspicion beneath her ribs. “I thought I smelled perfume on your shirt—something very…elegant. Figured it must’ve rubbed off from someone you met.” For a moment, his expression faltered, then steadied. “Oh—that. Yeah, one of them was…an older lady. Wore a lot of it.”
It was a simple answer, but Julia heard the shift—the forced ease, the too-quick recovery. It wasn’t the words themselves, but the gap between them. That pause told her more than the sentence that followed. He hadn’t expected the question, and that alone was enough to make her uneasy.