“I’m sorry about the way that video came out, but you should listen to what it said.”

“I watched it about fifty times,” he replied. “I could recite it verbatim.” His thick eyebrows furrowed in frustration, and she followed the thin scar above his left eye before refocusing herself.

“And you don’t have a problem with any of it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You know Cameron County was already the poorest in Pennsylvania before Horace, and—”

“I don’t want to talk about work.” He cut her off with a sharpness she hadn’t heard since he first knocked on her door.

“I’m not talking about work.” She modulated her voice in response, settling on a much softer tone. “I’m talking about you. I know how hard you’ve worked. I know how important it was for you to prove yourself, to be the man of your family, and—” she could hear a wobbly emotion beginning to color her words and cleared her throat. “And you succeeded. You won. Couldn’t you still take care of your mother without working for them? Like, when is it enough, Danial?”

His eyes were glassy, his jaw tensing and untensing for a few moments before he swallowed hard and responded. When he spoke, his voice was unsteady and quiet.

“If you know how hard I worked, and how important it was to prove myself, how could you do that to me? How could you humiliate me like that?”

She stood, silent, as he composed himself, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. Her gaze flicked upward again to that scar, the old wound from a prep school hazing gone wrong. It had become such a feature of his face that she often forgot its origins, the humiliation he suffered as a teenager at the hands of boys with a thousand times more than him. The thought that she could have brought him back to that place of deep public embarrassment shattered her.

“I’m sorry,” she offered, and meant it. “I guess I just wanted to stop you.”

It was a truth she took some solace in: yes, she had wanted to hurt him—but more than that, she wanted to save him, to stop him from becoming this person she couldn’t respect. It was still supremely selfish, but at least there was a flicker of love within the raging fire of her anger.

“You could have called me at any point if you wanted to stop me that bad,” he replied, blinking hard to hold back his emotion.

His words lingered between them for a moment, and though she longed to comfort him, she also needed to defend her former self.

“You know I couldn’t,” she whispered. “Not after what happened.”

At his side, his hand clenched into a fist before he opened it again, stretching his fingers.