Dorfner was shouting, had his hands on Cyril’s arms. When had he crossed the room? Cyril let himself be pressed roughly back into his seat.

“Thank you,” said Aristide. “That’s enough.”

Dorfner retreated to his corner.

“Of course not.” Ari’s fists were tight enough that the leather of his gloves puckered at the joints. He pressed them hard against the ugly yellow tabletop and addressed them solely when he spoke. “But you’re making the people who love you pay to see you killed.”

The pieces of Cyril’s pride fell to the ground, hardly clattering, and he sagged against the sharp metal frame of his chair.

Aristide rose, gathering his mink about him. “Perhaps I should go.”

It took too long for Cyril to work out what he ought to say, and in the end he just pushed out whatever words were on top, to keep Aristide from walking out the door. “I knew you were alive.”

He didn’t come back to his chair, or turn. Or even speak. But neither did he leave.

“I saw you in a newspaper,” said Cyril, and it sounded like begging. “Probably a month after it went to print, but I saw your face. I knew you were alive.”

Silence, still.

“You want to know why I never looked for you?” He paused but got no answer, and so blundered ahead. “I was ashamed.”

“Ashamed?” Aristide’s voice was tight as a trip wire.

“Of course,” said Cyril. “You got out, you made your way. In the photo, you looked so … How could I come to you, after all I did? After I—stones.” He let his head drop, so his fist in his own hair was the only thing that held his face off the table. “I made such a mess of things.” The words strangled on unshed tears.

“You should have known better.”

It stung enough that Cyril pulled himself together and looked up, grateful for his anger. “Oh? You’d have wanted me? Even then, crawling back and cringing?”

A light kindled in the depths of Aristide’s eyes, an ember catching a draft. “Of course,” he said, and even his voice had grown warmer. “Haven’t I always liked you on your knees?”

Whatever filled Cyril’s heart, it hurt like blood rushing past a loosened tourniquet.

Higata had told him that his life was his punishment. That it wasn’t worth their time to kill him because he’d suffer a thousand times worse if he lived. But now he saw the truth of it. The instant before death would be worse than another thirty, forty, fifty years of guilt because in that instant an infinity of failures would unfurl before him: all the things he might have done and would now never do. All the opportunities to do better that he would turn away, in paying a symbolic price for past wrongdoing.