I watched it hit Matthias, and it was like watching a building settle wrong.

There was a half-second where his face simply refused the sentence — where the words went in and found nothing they could attach to, because everything they touched was load-bearing.

His father.

His best friend.

The man he had buried and the man he had leaned on his whole life, folded suddenly into a single impossible fact.

I saw him try to laugh it off and fail.