I felt like a man who had attended a funeral for someone still alive.

Because the thing no one quite grasped was that I had lost something too, that morning in the trauma bay — not a patient, whom I had saved, but a friend, whom I had not, because the friend had never existed.

The Luca Vance I had loved for forty years, the best man at my wedding, the voice on the other end of a hundred difficult phone calls, was a fiction, a character performed for me and for everyone by the empty, calculating thing I had glimpsed for half a second in that bedroom.

I had not lost him to prison.