And now that peace was gone, because Quenby had not died of grief.

She had died of a lie — a manufactured, deliberate, cruel lie, built by two people who had watched her grieve and calculated that her death would make their scheme easier.

Tamsyn would say it aloud later, on the wire, in so many words: that Quenby’s death had made things simpler.

His wife had not been taken by fate.

She had been killed, as surely as if they’d done it with their hands, by a grief they engineered and maintained and profited from.

Holding his living daughter, Ellard understood that he would now have to grieve his wife all over again, this time for the truth of what had been done to her, and that this second grief would be harder than the first, because the first had at least been clean, and this one never would be.