For eighteen months the guilt had at least been hers, a thing she owned and could in some grim way control, a verdict she had handed down on herself and could therefore sit in judgment of.

To learn that it had never been true, that Gabriel had died not from any gap in her but from a part some man had knowingly sold corrupt to save a dollar, did not at first lighten the weight.

It changed its shape into something worse, into the realization that his death had been not a tragedy but a theft, that he had not fallen so much as been pushed, by a person who had never met him and never would and had factored his life into a spreadsheet as an acceptable cost.

The guilt had at least made his death mean something about her.