His brother arrived twenty minutes later, soaked from the rain.

When Silas saw his wife in the chair beside Dorian’s bed, the whole story arranging itself in his face, he went rigid — and then, within a minute, the two lovers were turning on each other.

Sabeen sobbed that Dorian had manipulated her into it.

Dorian shouted that Sabeen had come to him first.

The perfect couple dismantled each other in real time, in front of the nurses, while Linnea stood very still and watched the thing she had married reveal exactly what it had always been.

Before the staff finished treating them, an attending asked Linnea, as Dorian’s next of kin, to sign a routine admission consent.