Patience wanted to ask what was wrong, but she wasn't sure she should. Making him talk about his paranoia couldn't be very good for him, could it? For his sake, she shouldn't.
"I wish I could do something," she said. "Fix - fix whatever it is that's wrong."
She didn't really mean the Ministry. She meant him, whatever had given him such a gloomy outlook on the world. Maybe it wasn't paranoid delusions, maybe it was just his vantage point. There was a reason he was on the run, using a fake name, right? If she could just explain to him how things worked, when he thought they were flawed - but the only answers she was coming up with was what she'd heard from the Ministry, or from Chastity.
Chastity. If things had gone that wrong, she would know, wouldn't she? If it wasn't necessary for the Ministry to do what they did, if they were doing something wrong, Chastity would have known, would have done something about it. Patience didn't have to take the Ministry's word for it, she could take her sister's.
That made her feel a great deal better, because she trusted Chastity. "It's alright," she said. "I don't really know how to make you feel better about - about everything, but it's alright. I'll write to you again."