Thea, phone drooping in her hand.

And Lucius, on his feet, staring up at his wife with an expression she had waited eight years to see and had stopped believing she ever would — the expression of a man realizing, far too late, that he had never once bothered to find out who he was actually married to.

She felt no cruelty looking at them.

She had passed beyond cruelty into something cooler and more final.

She simply looked, the way you look at a house you used to live in as you drive past it for the last time, and then she looked away, and kept walking toward the stage.

Chapter 11 — Who They Have Always Been