“Yeah,” she said. “It gives me the worst feeling, when I look back on things in retrospect. So many stupid things we should have paid attention to. So many. We let a lot of things slide because we were worried about how it would change the tone of things, and because of friendship, or what we thought was friendship. I’d rather see people get upset now than have it all go wrong later.”

“Yeah. We’ve talked about that,” Tristan said. Then, like he was remembering I was there, he turned to me. “Both of our teams capsized. We’ve done the whole thing before, where you go out, get drunk, and rant about the past—”

“No we didn’t,” Sveta said.

“Let me finish. We did it without the drinking part, I mean.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Sveta said. “I guess.”

“Yeah,” I said. “A good rant can be healthy. Get it out.”

“We’ve done that. The drunken bemoaning of existence, without being drunk,” she said.

“I wasn’t able to talk,” I said.

“Still. You worked that keyboard.”

I shrugged.

“I’m trying to be balanced about this,” she said. “I made this mistake once, and I don’t want to be blind, but I feel like pushing too hard or prying might make things break down, and that doesn’t make it better. I’m not going to say you’re doing it wrong, Victoria.”

“I don’t know if I’m doing it right.”

“Yeah. But… you do what feels right, because I don’t know if I’m doing it right either. I want to help people stay together. That means protecting each other, being supportive, that’s my priority. We have to know each other, that’s part of it, and it’s the part where I don’t necessarily sympathize with Chris.”

“I don’t want to repeat my error from earlier and pry,” I said, checking to see if Kenzie and Chris were coming. “But… has he talked about his background? His deal?”

“No,” Tristan said, at the same time Sveta shook her head.

“Some,” Sveta said. “But hypotheticals. He’s real about the stuff like the center he’s living at now, and his health issues, his power, but even that’s…”

“Yeah,” Tristan said.

“He doesn’t leave you very sure about it,” I said.

Sveta nodded. “I’m not going to pry or dig, but I am going to pay attention. Not just talking about Chris, for the record.”

“I’m not good at that,” Tristan said. “I hear you two. I get it, we made a mistake with Ashley. That hard conversation with Rain took far too long, he left, and he didn’t really reconnect until the whole thing with the Fallen camp ended… and he went straight from there to jail, pretty much. Ashley… I felt like utter shit, sitting there in the pre-court thing, knowing we put her in that position.”