VICTOR

He had attended the funeral.

That surprised people — that there was a funeral at all, given the circumstances. The body had been identified, the cause of death confirmed, and there was nothing in the official record that required any ceremony.

But he had needed the ceremony. He understood that now, eight months later, in a way he hadn't understood it at the time.

He had stood at the graveside on a cold November morning and looked at a casket that contained someone he'd had killed, and he had felt something disassemble in him that had not reassembled correctly since.

Not remorse, exactly. Or not only remorse. It was more specific than that.

He kept remembering things.

The way Adeline had moved through a building — any building, a house, a hotel, someone else's project — with the specific attention of someone who was always reading the structure. She would touch walls, he'd noticed. Not conspicuously. Just a hand trailing along the surface of a thing while she looked at something else, as if she was taking information in through her palms.

He remembered the night they'd driven past a half-built apartment complex and she had pulled over, uninvited, and gotten out of the car to look at the framing. Not doing anything. Just looking. For ten minutes in the rain.

He had been annoyed at the time.

He had not been able to stop thinking about it for eight months.

He had killed someone who touched walls to read buildings in the rain.

He had done this because Harlan had presented him with a solution to a financial problem and he had been tired and pressured and had told himself Adeline was a practical woman who would understand, if she could somehow be told, that this was the most efficient exit available.

The logic had the specific shape of a lie he'd told himself so many times it had started to feel like reason.

The funeral was small. Her mother had come — a woman in her late fifties who had looked at Victor with an expression he could not read and had not spoken to him. Two colleagues from her architectural firm. A friend he hadn't known she had.

He had stood at the grave and not cried.

He had driven home and sat in his kitchen — the kitchen they'd rebuilt after the fire, the new wiring, the clean walls — and he had cried then, alone, in the specific shameful way of a man who knew exactly why he was crying and understood that the knowledge made it worse, not better.

Eight months ago.

He was still sitting with it.

His phone buzzed.

Sara, his head of development. *New consultant starts Monday. The Elena Marsh hire. Just confirming she's received the welcome documentation.*

He glanced at the name.

Elena Marsh.

He didn't know an Elena Marsh.

He wrote back: *Good. Keep me posted on the project.*

He put his phone down.

He went back to the contracts on his desk.

He had a company to run.

He ran it with the specific efficiency of a man who had learned that staying busy was the only thing that kept the kitchen out of his head.

He had been asked, at the graveside, whether he wanted a moment alone.

He had said no.

He had said no because being alone with the casket would have required him to know what to say, and he had not known what to say. He still didn't. Eight months later, sitting in his office with the new project files in front of him and Sara's message about the consultant on his phone, he still did not know what he would have said at that graveside if he'd been honest.

*I'm sorry* was true but insufficient.

*I didn't mean for it to go this far* was what Harlan had said, not him, and it was a lie regardless.

*You deserved better* was the truest thing, and the most useless.

The month after the funeral he had gone to her old firm. Not officially — not as her husband, because her husband had no business there now. He'd gone as a potential client, he'd told himself, looking at their portfolio. He'd sat in their lobby and looked at the work on the walls and had recognized, in two pieces he was certain were hers, the specific quality of her eye. The way space was organized not around aesthetic preferences but around how people actually moved.

She had always been thinking about how people moved.

He had always been moving past her.

He'd left without speaking to anyone.

He had not gone back.

The Elena Marsh memo had arrived in his inbox eight months later and he had read it with the specific feeling of someone encountering a voice that reminded them of someone they'd lost, and then he'd shaken that feeling because it was not useful and he was a man who tried to make use of what was in front of him rather than what was gone.

He had not done that particularly well lately.

But he was trying.

He put the phone down.

He picked up the project file.

He had a company to run, a project to improve, and a new consultant whose work was genuinely good.

That was what the day was.

He held onto that.

He worked.