“Well.” He sipped his wine again, flicking his eyes down to the glass she hadn’t touched. “It came up, obviously.”

“With everyone?”

“Yeah, of course. I mean, I told them.” He adjusted his cutlery nervously. “I told them you had a personal thing in Athens—a good reason for leaving. But they aren’t stupid, Alex. The video came up.”

“What did Danial say?”

“He didn’t say anything.” Paul clocked her suspicious expression and nodded for emphasis. “Literally. He was just in a corner scrolling. Reading comments, I think. He was silent all through breakfast.”

She took a beat to consider the implications, the mental damage inflicted on someone reading thousands of hateful comments about their work when they weren’t already used to it, like she was. Among many other things, she wished she could give him a hug.

“Did he seem sad? Or more angry?”

“He seemed… exhausted, honestly.” Paul adjusted his plate as he spoke, becoming increasingly superfluous with his distractions. “I don’t think he got much sleep.”

After a moment, she pushed forward with a line of questioning likely to provoke more detailed answers. “And what did Guy say?”

“You know,” he said, pushing his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose, further hiding his expression, “he didn’t like it.”

“Too radical for him?”

“Basically.” His whole body was cheated away from her now, as if he were going to run from the table.

“Paul.” She put her hand on his knee, which had been nervously bouncing up and down since he’d joined her. “What did he say?”

There was a silence, then a breath so heavy it felt like it contained the whole life they’d shared.

“He said that your politics were just about resentment. And I told him—”

“Are you fucking kidding?” Suddenly, her remorse over her conversation with her mother—and even the fight with Danial—evaporated. All she could feel was the righteous frustration that always fueled her work, frustration at the flippancy with which people like Guy treated the lives of people like her, and her parents, and everyone who had less than he did.

“Babe, I defended you! I told him about your dad. I told him about the healthcare work, and all the Carter stuff. Dev did, too, by the way.”

“Thank you,” she huffed, finally grabbing her glass to take a long sip of wine. She leaned into her high ground, into the retroactive permission to leave the boat that Guy’s cutting words granted her.

“But,” he continued, tapping his finger on the table, “I’m just going to say this, and I don’t want you to get mad at me.”

“What?”

“I don’t think it was cool to put all that stuff about Danny’s work in there. It kind of undermined your point.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she snapped, more harshly than she’d intended.