that?” Sloane snapped. “It’s my picture that’s in the news, not yours.”
“Yeah, it’s your picture, but now those assholes and their ‘message’ are in the news again, and they get to be victims this time! You came at them out of nowhere, threatened them with a knife—”
“I didn’t threaten anyone with a knife!”
“That’s not what the picture of you holding a knife looks like. Do you think that shit doesn’t come back on the rest of us? That if you’re violent to protect me and Ines, that doesn’t make us look violent too? And we don’t get to bounce back the way you do! We get to sit here worrying if a bunch of extremists are going to burn our houses down.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Well, it must be nice to feel that confident,” Matt said. “But I don’t. I don’t get to lose my shit and punch a guy, I don’t get to mess up. I am always failing someone, all the time.”
All the anger seemed to go out of him at once. He sat down on the couch and slumped over his knees. The ice pack Sloane had been using for her swollen knuckles was wedged between the cushions, no longer frozen.
She wanted to comfort him, but she didn’t know how. She had never seen him so tired, so . . . disappointed. In the world, in himself, even in her. She sat next to him on the couch, her hands clasped over her knees. The television was off, so she saw them reflected in the black screen, Matt’s head hanging low, Sloane stiff and upright.
“He called you ‘boy,’ ” she said quietly.
“Yeah,” Matt said, turning his head so their eyes met. “What else is new?”
“What was I supposed to do, just let him talk down to you?” she said.
“I mean, for one thing, you were supposed to stay in the golf cart.” He raised an eyebrow. “What’s going on with you lately? You charged at him like a bull even before he said anything. It’s like you want to set the world on fire.”
Esther had asked her that too. What’s going on with you? The answer, of course, was waiting in the bottom drawer of her desk, the stack of FOIA documents she had stashed there.
Like he had read her mind, Matt said, “Esther told me about your FOIA request.”
“God, Esther.” Sloane pressed her hands to her face briefly. “I’m never telling her anything ever again.”
Matt waited. There was something about his posture that irritated her. The defeated sag to his shoulders. It would have been better if he had yelled at her.
“I requested the Project Ringer documents,” she said. “I wanted to know everything I could. It’s my life, and they have all these . . . records of it.”
“I understand wanting to know,” he said. “I just think it’s weird you didn’t tell me. And that you mentioned it to Esther before me.”
“I was going to tell you right away,” she said. “But then I read more and—it was upsetting.”
“And what? You didn’t want to upset me?”
She shook her head. “That’s not it.”
“Tell me about it, then.” He sounded earnest, but Sloane knew him too well to be fooled. He had used this tone when they fought the Dark One. She remembered one particular evening—they had been trying to track the Dark One when he was just a man, not a shadow in the middle of a Drain. Ines had been following a promising lead that had yielded nothing. Tell me what happened, Matt had said. But it had just been a moment of quiet before he erupted. The struggle had drawn them all as taut as an overstrung harp. She had not realized that the strain of living with her lately, or maybe of the Ten Years Peace celebrations, had affected him so much.
“Sometimes,” she said, taking her time, “when I’m upset about something, all you want to do is tell me why I shouldn’t be.”
“And that’s bad?”
“It makes me feel crazy! Like I can’t trust my own reactions to things.”
“We all need people to help us see things from different perspectives.”
She rolled her eyes. “You think I don’t make myself consider things from other angles?” She had spent a lifetime reacting and then questioning the reactions—a lifetime of second-guessing, self-interrogation, badgering her brain into thinking about things the right way. “You think I can’t?” Her volume was rising. “Did you ever consider that when I’m upset about something, it might be because it’s worth