She isn’t lying, not about this: she really does hate him. She hates him with a passion that burns hotter and fiercer than love, and he stokes it with every wry twist of his mouth, every subtle dig, every pointed look he gives to any of the others.

He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t speak to her. He doesn’t have to. He wrung every bit of violent knee-jerk resistance out of her a long time ago.

Juliet knows what Ben is doing as he prods the others, goads them into attacking. It seems like insanity to them, she’s sure, but she knows. It’s what he did to her, except he never did push her to actual violence. The closest she ever got to that was in coming at him in his kitchen, thrusting her finger into his face, pushing him back against the counter. But she had collapsed—a weakness she promised herself he would never see again, and so she had hated herself for crying in the operating room when he had made her another promise he had no intention of keeping.

She isn’t always much for keeping promises herself, and she has to feed her hatred with every ounce of strength she has to keep her eyes steady when she looks at him, to keep from remembering when they were friends, or so she thought. She’s stronger than he ever thought she was—or should that be stronger than she ever thought she was?

Sometimes she misses the Ben she remembers like a daydream. The man who met her at the dock, or stood at the front door of her new house with flowers, or bantered almost awkwardly with her while she put the finishing touches on her latest progress report.

But he wasn’t who she thought he was, and neither was she. She is Ben. Which means she hates herself, too.

Whenever he starts speaking, she pulls her disdain over her like chain mail. And whenever she sees the familiar confusion cross the faces of the Oceanic survivors, she smiles—the smile of cryptic cynicism that she learned from him. She recognizes the look because she used to wear it. They’re wondering what to make of him.

They’ll find out on their own, soon enough.