“Are you talking to me again?” she asked.

“I suppose I am,” he said. “You look like you’ve been in the wars.”

“You know me, always running into trouble.”

“And coming out the other side. That’s the important bit.” He kicked a pebble and it skittered away. “I don’t forgive you,” he said. “I’d like to. I’d like it if we could just forget about it all, get back together, carry on like before. But that’s not going to happen.”

“I know,” said Valkyrie quietly. “But I don’t want you to hate me, Fletch.”

“That’s a little out of your hands, though, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“It’s kind of hard to stay angry at you. You probably don’t feel you did anything wrong, do you?”

“Of course I do. I cheated on you.”

“But why?”

“Because I was stupid, and I didn’t think about it, and—”

“No,” Fletcher said. He looked at her. “At the time, what was going through your head? Why did you do it?”

“How is this going to help anything?”

“It’ll help prove my point.”

Valkyrie sighed. “I thought, at the time, that you were being too… boyfriendy.”

“Is that the technical term for it?”

“You were being too protective. You were…”

“Go on.”

They were in the park now, sticking to the well-lit areas. There was nobody else around. “You were lecturing me. You were disapproving of the things I did. I thought it was all just too safe, you know?”

“And you turned to Caelan. Who is anything but safe.”

“I suppose.”

“So when you cheated on me, you knew why you were doing it. You could justify it.”

“To a degree.”

“So in your head, it was all my fault.”

“What? No, that’s not what I meant.”

“Val, you did what you did, you made those decisions, because you were doing what you thought was the right thing for you at the time. I try to be angry but I just… can’t. You did what you thought was best for you. That’s how you live. You never set about to be mean or cruel. These are just things that happen, kind of like a side-effect.”

“Because I’m selfish.”

“Yeah. Because you’re selfish. Maybe you’ll grow out of it in a few years. I don’t know. I hope you do.”

“That’d be nice,” she murmured.

“I don’t hate you,” said Fletcher. “I may not like you all that much right now, but I don’t hate you. And I really don’t think it’d be a good idea to be around you any more. I’m moving.”

Something yanked at Valkyrie’s heart. “Where to?”

“Australia. I like it there. It’s warm, and they talk funny.”

“But what about your training?”