the voice itself as a veil — "Your voice gets different when you…"

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.