Ordinary deaths at the end of ordinary lives, and it doesn't feel like that would be better, truly. Particularly not for a physician, spurred to his calling by a brutal loss, only for more to slip through his fingers before they'd gnarled with pain and time and the enemies he's since made for himself. She thinks fleetingly of Abby and her Lev, or Morrigan unwilling to see Kieran housed in the Gallows for anything, but it's different again: he had been a child, too.

This time, when she presses a kiss to the nearest patch of skin she stays there for a moment, quiet and warm, offering the sort of tactile comfort that is most familiar to her and easiest to reach for— when saying something is hard, and crafting something that probably will still feel wildly insufficient takes time, she can just be near. She can do that.

“I'm sorry,” she says, finally, because it's true. For the loss; for the echo of responsibility he hasn't shaken off. Donna Strange's life could have been longer and it wasn't. And, the same stubbornness shaded into her care that had prompted her to tell Clarisse in so many words, you're worth coming back for, “These are things that matter, too, Stephen.”

The shape of him, she has; shading in the empty space where something has always been, though.