Noble swallowed like that would steel him, like that would take some of this out of him. He had poisoned Mrs. Crouch and he had poisoned himself and he was fighting with Ford, and he was sure that at some point in this conversation he’d made a misstep. If he’d said something different somewhere along the line, then he wouldn’t be fighting with what was probably the most important person in his life, and he wouldn’t be trying to find some way to rationalize himself out of the anger he tried to hard to avoid feeling.

“No,” Noble said, quicker than he’d like. “You can’t. Grace has to come out.” The shaking in his hands and his body was starting to still, not necessarily because he was any less furious — if anything, it was just because the physical manifestation had worked its way out of his body.

The thing was: the ingredients were not actually that expensive.

But — he wanted to know. If he’d poisoned someone he needed to know what had gone wrong. There was some part of his mind that was trying to work through a way to get around Ford’s ultimatum, even if Ford held him to it — keep some amounts of the possibly-tainted ingredients, find somewhere safe to isolate them, maybe even in the crowded workshop itself. There was a way around this. He just didn’t feel very good about it.

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