Noble was mutinous, and looked it; there was a rigidity to his posture that he usually didn’t have, and his shaking hand was white-knuckled on the glass. He was too angry to interrupt Ford, too ready to let something horrible come out of his mouth — he felt like he was backed into a corner. He should have let Ford think there was something wrong with him, rather than admit what he was doing, because he wouldn’t — couldn’t — let his brother tell him how to do this.

The last sentence struck him as if a blow; Noble’s expression twisted as some emotion in his chest was wrenched up and out of him, and he took a half-step back from the gin.
He didn’t know what to say to that, couldn’t come up with anything — might have found it almost endearing under other circumstances but all he could think now was you think I don’t know that? Noble knew it well, knew it better than anything — sometimes in his worst moments he thought that he would have done a better job at steering them through than Ford was, and he was always relieved that he didn’t have to.

“And you won’t have to,” he said, and it was still, maybe spat out — he was still pissed even though he was trying not to be, was trying to reel himself back in to something reasonable, some version of himself that was familiar rather than the version of himself he kept carefully caged. “But you can’t make me change how I work just because one scary thing happened.”

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