She didn’t cry. She didn’t run. She simply looked at him the way you look at a man who shows up alive to a funeral he allowed to happen. Then she kept walking.

Alexander sank back into his seat. “She’s alive,” he whispered, his chest heaving. “And she didn’t come to me.”

Marcus spoke without softening it. “Perhaps to her, Alexander, you’ve been dead these last two years too.”

After the ceremony, he tried to reach her near the lobby exit, calling her name barely above a whisper. “Valerie.” She paused for half a second. But she didn’t turn around.

An older professor put a protective hand on her shoulder and guided her through the crowd. Alexander understood the gesture and stopped. For the first time in his life, he realized that blood rights entitled him to nothing.

Marcus drew him toward a side exit. “We’re being recorded.” A man in a dark gray suit near the end of the corridor was holding up a phone, its camera aimed at them.