I wanted to say her name, to beg, but my throat was a desert and all the rhetoric that had won me empires turned to ash on my tongue.

I searched her eyes desperately for anger, for hatred, for a single tear — because if she hated me there was passion, and if she was angry there was a wound I might one day bandage.

But her eyes were a calm, placid lake.

There was nothing in them at all.

She looked at me with the polite indifference you give a stranger blocking a sidewalk, and it was the final blow to my ego: I did not matter enough to hate.

To her I was a ghost that had at last been exorcised.