The enormous bouquet slipped from his fingers and scattered across the clinical floor, white petals against white tile.

“No,” he choked, stumbling backward until his spine hit the wall, and then he slid down it, and collapsed onto the floor, and buried his fists in his hair, and let out a broken, agonized wail.

“Nora, I swear to God, I didn’t know!” I looked down at him from my bed, at the man sobbing on the floor, the man I had once loved more than my own life, and I felt the grief in me harden into something cold and clear and resolute.

Not, I want to be precise, into bloodlust; I did not, in that moment, crave his suffering for its own sake.