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expatriate who was only marrying him for the citizenship, and who had no intention of either sleeping with him or bearing his children, even via artificial insemination. I’d been a real shock to her system, and if there was one good thing about this situation, it was that we’d been married for so long that I was pretty sure I hadn’t killed her.
    Well. Mostly sure. She
had
rather been counting on us getting divorced once I had citizenship, and when that hadn’t happened, her disapproval had been a bit difficult to bear.
    Ben sighed, shoulders drooping. “I should be crying,” he said. “I should be a soggy mess in a corner somewhere, going through tissues and confessing all my sins. Instead, I’m standing here with you, talking about ice cream. Don’t you see how not right this is? I should be mourning more than I am. I should be
sadder
.”
    â€œNone of this means you didn’t love her, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œHow many times did you tell her that there’s no right way to love? Well, this is the flip side of that. There’s no right way to be sad, Benny-boy. Maybe you’re going to stop sleeping, or cry every night for the next year. Or maybe you’re going to return to business as usual, until one day you turn around and someone’s wearing her favorite color, or carrying a bouquet of her favorite flowers, and it breaks you.” I put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. “The only right way to mourn someone is to remember them. The rest is just trappings.”
    Again he smiled, although the expression came nowhere near his eyes. “How do you know so much about mourning?”
    â€œMy mother was a banshee and my father was the cold North wind,” I said. I took my hand off of his shoulder. “Now come on, what do you say we go and get that milkshake? It’s my treat. You can have whatever you want.”
    â€œI say—” Ben paused. “I say hold on a moment.” He raised a finger, signaling me to wait, before he reached up and tapped the skin behind his left ear, activating his bone-implant phone. Not as disposable as a burner or as attractive as an ear cuff, but no one could take it away from him, and the only way to permanently disable it would be surgical. Better yet, because it was made of lab-grown bone matrix, it didn’t show up on most equipment sweeps. Even if the rest of us were stripped of our gear, he’d have a way of reaching the outside world. That was worth its weight in bullets.
    I crossed my arms, rolling my eyes extravagantly as he walked a few feet away, lowering his voice. That meant the call was private enough for him to not want me listening in. Rare, annoying, and a good opportunity to sweep the area. I stepped back into my original position in front of the statue and started my scan.
    The funeral home was empty, the shuttered windows dark and the parking lot deserted. There was a red dot above the main window, attached to a small black box; a Devlin security system, most likely, hardwired into the local police department’s computers. Funeral homes are no more dangerous than any other business that regularly admits large groups of people, and are probably a lot less dangerous than some. That doesn’t stop their insurance rates from climbing every time someone gets a bad feeling about them, which has meant some heavy investments in security. The average funeral home is better protected than most banks.
    If the red light was on, there was no one left inside: Even the staff had gone home. I switched my attention to the surrounding buildings.
    Not many people will voluntarily live right next to a funeral home, despite the aforementioned excellent security. If I wound up in the neighborhood, I would have been asking about storing my valuables in the old embalming rooms. So it was no surprise that the curtains on the apartments to