On the corner of his desk stood a small framed photograph of that man: Roderick Benedict, unsmiling, serious-eyed, the way he’d been in life.

Brandon looked at it for a while.

“We did it, Roderick,” he said quietly, to the empty room and the rain. “Your life’s work didn’t buy anybody a house on the beach. It bought surgeries.

And birthdays. And a girl going to medical school. It bought hundreds of kids a whole future they weren’t going to get.” He was quiet a moment. “I hope that’s what you wanted.

I think it’s what you wanted.”

Somewhere out there, in cold cells they would not leave, Demi and Gareth were serving out the years — two people who had looked at a human life and seen only what it was worth in dollars, and had turned love into a weapon and a slow illness into a business plan, and had lost, in the end, everything they’d committed murder to keep.