The funeral was on a Tuesday, but Edward didn’t attend.
Instead, he sat in his laboratory at Cambridge, the same laboratory where he’d discovered the cellular mechanism that would eventually cure cancer, the same laboratory where Bella used to bring him coffee at midnight and kiss his forehead and tell him to come home and stared at his wife’s last MRI scan.
Her brain, mapped in exquisite detail just six months ago during a routine physical. Every neural pathway. Every synapse. Every electrical pattern that had made her, her. The data was still there, preserved in the hospital’s digital archives. The architecture of Bella’s consciousness, waiting.