She had gone into that meeting braced for him to rage, or to deny, or to weep and beg.

She had not been prepared for the thing he actually did, which was to argue logistics — to meet her grief with a defense of his medical reasoning, to answer you stole my body’s future with it was the safest option, as though the conversation were about surgical best practices and not about the desecration of her right to decide.

And in that mismatch she finally saw the whole of him.

He genuinely did not understand what he had done wrong.

He thought her objection was about the outcome, about whether the procedure had been sound, about whether a family might still be assembled some other way — because to Dorian, everything was an outcome, a number, a result to be optimized.

The concept at the center of her fury, that a person owns the decisions made about her own flesh regardless of whether those decisions turn out well, was simply not available to him.