I should stop there. I should take the hit and wait for Jace to come down from whatever altitude his rage has taken him to.
But I am hurt. I have been hurt for seven days. I have been sitting in an office that smells like her pencils and her lavender soap, staring at a desk that has her sketchpad still open on it, and I have been doing what I always do, which is processing in silence.
"I thought you'd left Jace the Thug behind," I say.
The words leave my mouth and I know immediately that I just made a mistake.
Jace stops bouncing.
His jaw clenches. His gloves drop to his sides. His eyes lock on mine with an intensity that has nothing to do with sparring.
Then he comes at me.
Not a punch. He tackles me. Full body, shoulder to my sternum, driving me backward off my feet. The pads fly. My back hits the packed dirt and the air leaves my lungs and Jace is on top of me, forearm across my chest, his face inches from mine.
"Take it back."
"Jace..." My voice is compressed. His weight on my chest makes the word thin.
"Take it back."
Reid's hands are on Jace's shoulders. Not gentle. The grip of a man who has pulled apart fights before and knows exactly how much force the situation requires.
"Enough." Reid's voice is the one that ends arguments. "Get off him. Now."
Jace doesn't move. His forearm presses harder. His eyes are wet and furious.
"I'm sorry," Meaning it completely.
Something shifts in his face. The rage flickers. Doesn't disappear, but loosens its grip, the way a muscle cramp releases not all at once but in stages.
Reid pulls him back. Jace lets himself be pulled. He stands, strips his gloves, throws them at the floor. His chest is heaving. Sweat drips from his jaw into the dirt.
Reid stands between us. The referee position, the mediator position, the position he's occupied between us for fourteen years. He looks tired. Not the physical kind. The kind that settles behind the eyes of a man who has been holding things together for too long.
"This isn't helping," Reid says. "Fighting each other isn't going to bring her back."
Jace wipes his face with the back of his hand. He's looking at the ground. When he speaks, the anger has burned down to something rawer underneath.
"You dropped the moral clause on her when everything was already falling apart. She was already scared. She was already pulling away. And you gave her one more reason to believe that being with us would destroy everything we built."
There it is. The blame, placed. Clear and specific and aimed with the same precision I just used against him.
I sit up in the dirt. My jaw throbs. My back aches where I hit the ground. I look at Jace and I don't defend myself because there is no defense.
"You're right," I say.
Jace looks at me. Surprised that I'm not arguing.
"The timing was wrong. I should have waited. I should have found a different way to point it out." I pause. "But everyone needed to know what was at stake."
Jace shakes his head in frustration. The frustration of a man who knows the logic is sound and hates that it is.
"It's not Owen's fault," Reid states. "Maya was putting distance between us before the clause came up. Before telling us the truth. Before any of it. She decided to leave the moment thosemen showed up in the driveway. Everything after that was exit strategy."
The wind moves through the pines. Somewhere down the valley, a bird calls. The sound is too bright for the conversation.
"The question," Reid says, "is what we do about it."
