What? This was the first thing she’d said that really hurt, that felt like it wasn’t possible to fit into the mold of a normal conversation with Jessica Yamada.

Why do I feel like there’s nothing that I could say that would change the tone of this conversation? Like my points aren’t being directly addressed?

“I’m damn well trying,” I said. “You asked me for help. You seemed okay with the coaching thing. You put me in close proximity to a dangerous biology-altering threat of global proportions without cluing me in.”

“He wasn’t a threat, Victoria. He needed more sessions but he was on his road to normalcy, striking his balance, learning the necessary skills.”

“He’s not the cataclysmic threat I was told to watch out for then?”

“He’s—” she started.

She stopped.

Don’t.

She wasn’t good at being evasive, or at thinking on the back foot.

Don’t shut me out. I don’t fucking deserve this.

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“Victoria…”

I waited. I didn’t respond, as much as there were fifty things I wanted to say. I let the silence hang, as she’d done to me many times before.

“No,” she said.

Fine. I’d say the first of those fifty things. “You want to accuse me of not caring for them? I sacrificed to help those guys. I gave up a literal pound of flesh, at least—!”

I pushed up my sleeve to show the scars I’d been through physio to rehabilitate. The scarred notch in my tricep.

“—for them! Because people wanted to kill them, because people wanted to kidnap or co-opt them, because they’d been taken to pieces. I gave my all, and your complaint is I’m not doing a perfect job of it? I’m paying too much attention to the cape side of things? That’s not a fight you win, when agents are involved. You don’t get wins, you find a working balance where you minimize the damage and you maximize the gains!”

“That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is pushing and diving into this reality to the point you end up in the hospital isn’t self-care. And—”

“And pushing them and letting them get hurt isn’t caring?”

Hesitation. “That’s not what I’m getting at.”

“You’re getting at something,” I said. “Except you’re not. You’ve frozen me out, you blocked my number, my emails bounce back, you have a meeting with my group without me, and when I finally get to talk to you, you’re not listening. You’re ready with a follow-up, like—like you’re strategizing your way through the conversation, picking and choosing what you’re able to get away with saying, and you’re so focused on that that you don’t hear me.”

“It’s not strategizing. I’m trying to be diplomatic.”