"He would not have wanted you to do that," Iris said.
Her voice was a hollowed out thing, stripped of its usual vibrance, possessing the flat, brittle quality of someone who had wept until the tears had turned to salt and the crying itself had become a physical exhaustion. "He never liked formal things... He always thought they were a waste of time..."
"Then I did it wrong," Rex replied.
There was no apology in his voice, only the clinical admission of a miscalculation.
Something shifted in the landscape of her face. It wasn't a smile, nor was it a sob; it was the infinitesimal adjustment of a person who had been drowning in the depths of their own grief and had suddenly felt a single, unexpected current of air from the world above.
"He liked..." she started, then faltered, the words catching in her throat like jagged glass.
Rex did not press her. He simply waited, a silent, unmoving presence beside the wooden box.
