Indirect speech - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirect_speechIn linguistics, indirect speech (also reported speech or indirect discourse) is a grammatical mechanism for reporting the content of another utterance without directly quoting it. For example, the English sentence Jill said she was coming is indirect discourse while Jill said "I'm coming" would be direct discourse.In fiction, the "utterance" might amount to an unvoiced thought that …