He was not crying because he was going to die. He had made his peace with that in the gray hour before dawn. He was crying for the four years, and for the particular loneliness of learning, at the very end, that the person who had held your hand had been holding it only to feel your pulse.

What Demi did not know — what she had been far too pleased with herself to notice — was that the smartwatch lying on the bedside table, the one Roderick still wore out of habit even here, had been recording since the moment she leaned over the rail.

He had turned it on that morning, after the doctor’s whisper in the hall, because some old instinct born of forty years of contracts and handshakes and men who smiled while they lied had told him to.

He had not known what he expected to catch. He had caught everything.

Chapter 3 — The Orderly

For a while he simply lay there, the recorder still running, the rain still coming down. Then, near the end of visiting hours, the door eased open and a young man came in quietly, carrying a fresh pitcher of water and moving with the practiced softness of someone used to entering rooms where people were sleeping or dying.

“Evening, Mr. Benedict,” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you. Just topping off your water.”