Jainan barely understood his last sentence, but it didn’t matter. It blinded him, the sudden, awful image of Audel and Kiem dissecting Jainan’s list of private humiliations, Kiem like this—distressed and disgusted at the same time. You couldn’t love someone when you had trawled through their sordid problems like this. They were only an object of pity. He was an object of pity.

Kiem was still talking. Jainan couldn’t make sense of it anymore. He imagined the garbled noise as a river below him, and he himself balanced on a dam that was cracking under his feet. Everything he’d built was falling apart.

Everything he had tried to do to save the treaty was rendered useless by his failure. He thought he’d been dignified, he thought he’d been brave—really, he had just been in denial about the fact that nothing could save his dignity when people found out. Nothing could make him more than a sob story.

“Jainan?” Kiem said. He had stopped; he was only a pace away from Jainan.

“You look—Jainan!” The name was like a whip. Kiem reached out.

Jainan pulled away. His failure, his terror was coming to a point in his head

like a storm building. He hadn’t even moved consciously. The pressure swelled unbearably, shot through with fury and panic, and what came out of his mouth was, “How dare you?”

Kiem’s mouth formed the start of what, but didn’t finish it.

“I asked you not to talk about it! You had no right!” Kiem actually flinched.

But he had stopped talking, finally, and Jainan didn’t dare let him start again.

Jainan was shaking. “This was my marriage, my past—did you think you were entitled to it just because I married you? How dare you!”

“I didn’t—I wouldn’t—” Jainan could barely see Kiem through the haze that blurred everything, but Kiem’s voice was agonized. Sweet God, it was so much easier to be angry than afraid.

“I have to go,” Jainan said. It sounded lame and faltering. “I have to go and get—I have to go.”

He struck out rapidly for the exit. Kiem moved as Jainan did, his arm outstretched to catch Jainan’s elbow. “Wait! Jainan!”

Jainan shoved the door aside and burst into the hallway, now crowded with dinner guests. People were looking at them. They were in the way of the exit; Jainan had to stop for an instant, trapped. He turned his head.

“I … I understand,” Kiem said. The tight lines at the corners of his eyes were back. “I’m, I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”

And then he was gone.

It happened so fast that Jainan didn’t even realize Kiem had really gone until the murmur of chatter started up again. People’s sidelong glances were turning into outright stares. Kiem had pushed through the crowd, not toward their guest suite, but deep into the station in the opposite direction.