the voice itself as a veil
You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking. Sometimes it’s like you don’t want me to follow.
Context
Gately, no judge of much, catches the one thing that matters: Joelle's register keeps shifting, sliding into a fluent evasive rhetoric exactly when the subject gets close, and the shifts are themselves a way of not being followed. Her voice — the thing she'd reduce herself to, the pure channel — turns out to be its own veil, a concealment worn inside the medium of contact. The place she can't be reached is not behind the cloth but inside the diction.