The heat of the coffee helps. Or maybe it's the faint scalding of his esophagus. Or maybe it's just the fact that she clearly didn't mean to push any buttons and feels bad about it.

He doesn't know Jess well, but he knows enough about her background to know that she's not exactly the most well-socialized person. She's like a puppy who never learned to speak dog. (Sometimes, he knows how that feels. You learn a very very specific dialect of human interaction in an abusive home, in an orphanage, or in a shady circus. That dialect isn't really spoken by many people who haven't grown up with it.)

"It's okay," he says. "I mean, I managed to miss three of my teammates disappearing like six months ago just because I was in Canada."