Zelda took the letter back from him and tucked it into the pocket of her jacket. She rubbed at one eye with her left hand.

"Do you ever just feel like -" she started, then shook her head. She was good with Ari now, or she was fine with Ari now, but that did not mean that she had forgiven him completely, and it did not mean that she wanted to get into it. "It doesn't matter. The project I'm working on is - hard. And it matters." It mattered and she was buried in research and spellwork and careful containment spells, and she did not know how to fix it.

And Mr. Darrow didn't care. Certainly he cared about the boat, but he didn't care about her, that much was clear. She just didn't understand where she had gone wrong - whether things had been irreparably broken all along or whether there was some point at which she had gone off course.

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