"Please," Stephen says, waving his hand dismissively. "Everyone knows it's Jason making an ass of himself personally and that you have nothing to do with it." Are they going to bitch about Jason? Because he's always down to bitch about Jason. He takes a seat across from her, settling cross-legged on the blanket. "You've handled it all very gracefully." The compliment is sincere.

The thing that's not being mentioned, of course, is just how un-gracefully Stephen himself was behaving up until the unveiling of Cyrus Reagan's new laws. He's less a mess now, but it was a very public mess.