He had performed the loving husband bearing a shared sorrow with such total commitment that she had never for one instant suspected the sorrow was a crime and she was its only true victim.

That was what she could not forgive, in the end — not that he had taken her ability to choose, though that was monstrous, but that he had then stolen her grief too, had made her spend four years mourning at the grave of a thing he had killed, comforting herself with the love of the man holding the knife.

He had not only wronged her.

He had stage-managed her suffering, and cast himself as her fellow mourner, and watched her thank him for his kindness.

A person who can do that, she understood, is not a man who made a terrible choice.

He is a man with something missing where the rest of us keep our souls.