"Thanks for understanding."

(It's for your own good. Though-- if you put it like that Oscar feels pretty guilty and underhanded.)

"Are we also not sending either letter or invite to Dr. Aarons, then."

"I mean I'm not going to stop you." He's obviously flustered.

(Doctor Aarons is not going to get seduced by a cultist, Sal!)

"I do think we need to send it to Aarons. Whatever the concerns about Ruby's privacy, keeping him in the loop about Roby overrides them, especially since he doesn't even know who Ruby is."

"You want to send it to a figure with some amount of legal authority?"

What is in this invitation???

"....it's the evidence we have that Roby is at Lake Mullardoch. If we want him to believe us about that I don't see what other options we've got."

"Go for it. I said I'm not stopping you." He takes out the letter and hands it to Inaaya.

He just had it on him?

If Terrence physically grabs that thing out of your hands Sal will not blame him.

Terrence isn't going to like--

Terrence restrains himself from grabbing the letter but he does fidget and look away and tap his foot on the ground, maddened by curiosity.

See! See the danger! Okay, Oscar needs to regain composure.

Jing Yi is definitely craning his neck to see if he can get a look at it.

With all my love, forever,

...yeah, that does seem like something Roby would write to Ruby.

And then it's in her bag to go in the envelope when they send the letter to Aarons.

Later, at Ruby's house--

Jing Yi is going to do his best impression of the saddest and most destitute kitten that you want to bring in out of the rain. (It's easy enough-- it's close enough to how he actually feels.) "Ruby? I have a favour to ask."

She's en masc and, relatedly, she looks a bit like a dead cat.

"What?"

"I know last time I asked if you wanted the sane or insane version, so I'm just going to skip to the utterly insane version: I might be being mind controlled, and everyone wants me out of the apartment to see if that fixes it and... I have nowhere to stay."

"...what."

The problem with aggressively compartmentalizing his life is that it's so easy to just have a mountain of context that he suddenly has to explain.

"You know Evie MacQueen?"

"...the fashion designer?"

"The fashion designer, who can definitely mind control people, and who I apparently act very mind controlled around!"

"...darling, I do want to say things other than 'what' repeatedly, but I am having difficulties with this otherwise reasonable goal!"

"I can give details, if that would help?"

He would rather remove his own molars. There's part of him that wants to explain the wonderful things that happened, the good news that's coming, but-- he knows that's fake. And everything seems stupid and ridiculous in that light, and he can't explain it in a way that makes him look good.