Ah. What is right here? What is good? To sleep with her before abandoning her? Perhaps that will fit him into the mold of a typical scoundrel. Perhaps that will make him hateful, hateable. Keep her from sadness, because she'll have loathing to dwell on. Or perhaps she'll blame herself for it, in the way that your mind so often starts working in that direction - I didn't keep him, I couldn't keep him. A younger Byerly Vorrutyer, before his ImpSec days, was sometimes prone to that. Yes - a younger Byerly Vorrutyer, new to the Vorbarr Sultana social scene, fell in love time and again with horrible men and horrible women who picked him up and dropped him hard. And he remembered the way he'd get drunk and sit in the dark and try to figure it out, figure out what was wrong with him, thinking over every word and gesture, obsessing over every flaw in his personality and his appearance and his manner of dress and the way he laughed...

He has the horrible image, for just a moment, of Sonia become like him. Cynical and miserable. A user. The thought makes him sick.

"I don't know," he says, his hand coming up to cover hers. His voice remains teasing - as light as he can possibly manage. "I'm a rather famous liar, you know. What if I only make you think there's a difference?"