Sveta nodded. “When you’re disabled, and I see myself as disabled, then your world gets smaller. Things get harder. It’s easy to become dependent or let down your guard. Everything’s hard and it’s really easy to stop trying altogether, to rely on people who want to help, to do what Victoria said and normalize that behavior and let the toxicity seep into things, only to have it come to a head during an already bad day.”

“I’m just going to cut in here,” I said. “I one hundred percent think what you’re saying is cool and good. It’s a good mindset. I did catch one thing you said and it made me think. You said ‘self-sufficient’ and one of the things I was thinking about mentioning was, you know, heroing is hard, and it’s kind of hard in part because it doesn’t pay. That can lead to self-insufficiency instead.”

“It can pay,” Tristan said.

“It can,” I said. “But it paid in part because people wanted to put money toward it. Because the governments backed it and put money into the PRT, which paid the heroes a decent wage with opportunities for more. I spent my entire life seeing my mom stressing out in front of the computer or in front of the paperwork, from the time I could walk to the time I went to the hospital.”

“It can absolutely pay, though,” Tristan said. He glanced at Mrs. Yamada and then said, “I was a member of a corporate team, I saw and participated in the fundraising and merchandising, and we did well. We made a good bit of money.”

“Which team?” I asked.

“Reach.”

“Oh, kudos. I know Reach,” I said. “I’m not sure I could list off the roster as of Gold Morning but I’m more than passingly familiar. Good team.”

“Thank you,” Tristan said. “I mean, I’m not so worried about the money. That’s the easy part.”

“I don’t think it’s easy at all,” I said. “There’s a saying, um, seventy percent of couples break up because of financial issues. The same number of cape teams break up because of the same.”

“What’s so hard about it?” Sveta asked.

“You’re providing a service, and the fruits of that service aren’t immediately tangible. If you do everything right, get crime rates down, clean up the neighborhood, then people look at the clean streets and low crime rate and they wonder why they’re paying you. If the crime rate stays high and things are a mess, then they wonder why they’re paying you.”

“How do you get around that?” Chris asked.