He had seen Vanessa’s beauty and charm and polish and taken them for a soul, exactly as he had seen Maria’s uniform and taken it for the whole of her.

He had been fooled by the beautiful counterfeit and blind to the genuine article, and both failures came from the same place — a habit, bred by a life of wealth, of never looking past the surface of a person to the truth underneath.

Vanessa had exploited that habit.

Maria had suffered from it.

And Daniel, sitting in a hospital room at dawn, resolved that whatever else came of this night, he would never again mistake a surface for a soul.

Chapter 12 — The Struggle