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The first time Mat writes a confession he is ten and it is on the back of a small pond stone. He etches it into place with the tip of a knife. Four simple words: I love Rand al'Thor, carved in a messy uneven script.
He turns it over in his hand dozens of times, while glancing down the bank of the pond, towards where Rand and Egwene are sitting next to each other, laughing and murmuring in a way that excludes everyone else in the Waterwood. Dappled by sunlight they look picture perfect, and the rest of the Two Rivers youths who had come down to swim all give them a wide berth out of respect for that picture. Mat wonders if they notice. They probably don't.
No one pays Mat any mind. It is one of his great gifts. When Mat doesn't wish to command attention, he might as well be a shadow of a boy. No one has interest in what he is doing unless he forces them to have an interest. So no one bothers to look at what he's written, even when he stands, walks to the edge of the pond, and skips the stone into the center of the lake. It wizes past Eward Congar's head and he spins to start cussing out Mat, but Mat doesn't pay him any attention. Instead he watches the stone sink with soft plop and imagines it's fall down to rest at the bottom of the pond.
Mat exhales, but feels no lighter. By the time Eward has clambered onto the bank, Mat's temper is sour enough to punch him right in the nose.
By the time Mat is twenty, sixty-four more stones sit at the bottom of that pond, all with the same message written into them, but he never finds the courage to speak the words aloud, even to himself.