My voice sounded tight and closed off. I stepped back, away from his offered hands and comfort. What I wanted was to be so strong that nobody would be able to touch me. All I would take from him in that moment was information.
“He was reported missing from his home in the Dark city,” said Ethan. “There was no sign of a struggle or forced entry. He has been gone for less than twenty-four hours. He may have gone somewhere of his own accord. He might be back at any moment.”
I laughed, and he jolted at the sound. “Come on, Ethan. You don’t believe that.”
He stopped trying to reach for me.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. But I don’t know what else I can say to comfort you.”
“You could start by not lying to me, or yourself. I don’t want comfort.”
“You comforted me,” said Ethan. “You supported me at every turn, and you made it look easy. Let me try and do the same for you. Let me just try.”
My father thought I was able to care for him, carry both his and my weight in Penelope’s home, be a daughter, a student, a famous victim, girlfriend to a celebrity, and as good as a mother. He thought because I smiled and pretended like it was no trouble—because smiling was one of the things I was expected to do—that the weight of expectations was not absolutely crushing.
So many expectations weighed down on me. I felt as if I was in a story I had heard once, of a man who had stone after stone pressed to a board over his chest. As long as he had had breath, he had asked for more, and I understood why he had asked. After a certain point the idea of a world where you were not under pressure seemed like a dream, and all you could imagine was more weight being added until you broke, and sometimes you wanted the relief of breaking sooner.
I broke then.
“You can’t comfort me,” I said. “Especially not when you say stupid things like this. You think it’s easy? To be everything to him, to you, to the council, to be so much and never be anything objectionable? You think it’s effortless because it’s supposed to be effortless—”
“I never said that,” Ethan protested. “I never said anything like that. I said you made it look . . . I know how hard you try.”
That didn’t make it any better. I wanted how hard I tried to be invisible but appreciated all at once: I wanted what I could not have and I wanted Jarvis to be safe and I did not know how to stop being angry.
“And it suits you for me to try, when you need me to be strong. But not when you want to feel better about yourself and what you did—who you sent to his death. When you want to feel like a big strong man consoling a weak, weeping woman, things are different. Then you act as if I am something to be protected, like I’m a piece of china to be kept in a glass case. Maybe you want me to be breakable, so you can shield me. But I’m not. How can I be fragile and do everything I have to do?”
Ethan’s hands clenched into fists when I said “death.” He did not interrupt me, but with every word his face grew paler and paler. We stood as far apart as that richly decorated corridor would allow us to stand, and I wished we could be even farther.
“You’re the one who always tries to protect me,” said Ethan, and he was shouting suddenly back at me, as he’d never shouted before. “As if I’m the fragile one, as if I can’t understand anything. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to love someone who will not let you help them?”
“I treat you as if you can’t understand anything because you can’t understand anything. You’ve lived your whole life in the Light. You’ve never been hungry or cold or left bleeding in the Dark. You think I’m wrong? You think you do understand? Tell me, Ethan Stryker,” I said, and I wielded the name as if it was a blade, and saw him flinch as if it had been one. “How can you?”
“Just because we’ve had different lives doesn’t mean we can’t try to understand each other,” Ethan said. “Just because I’ve lived a life of privilege doesn’t mean that I can’t sympathize, that I don’t have a heart to feel or a mind to know that what you suffered and what other people are still suffering is terribly wrong. The laws against the Dark are disgusting and cruel, and the whole system needs to change.”
I felt myself tense all over, and I looked toward the door behind which Mark Stryker and his council sat. When I looked back at Ethan, he was still watching me. It did not even occur to him what danger could be coming.
“It is a privilege to say—to even think—that the system is cruel,” I said in a low, furious voice. “What you are doing is talking treason, and you could be killed for it.”