The difficult part of an honest answer is often letting someone be disappointed by it.

The hard part is rarely the sentence. Most people can say the true thing. What they cannot do is sit in the silence afterwards while somebody is unhappy about it, so the answer gets softened, hedged, or half reversed within a minute, not because the truth changed but because the discomfort was unbearable. Letting a person be disappointed treats them as able to handle real information.

Give the honest answer this week and then stay quiet for a moment. Resist filling the pause with qualifications, and let the other person have their own reaction to it.