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For a moment, I think he might answer properly. Instead, he sets the mug down and turns slightly toward the sink, which is deeply unfair because his back is very distracting and I am trying to interrogate him.

I pick at the corner of toast. “Alester talked about you yesterday.”

His shoulders still.

I stop chewing.

“He said you were his father’s physician,” I continue. “For almost twenty years.”

Dalton doesn’t turn around immediately. When he does, his expression is controlled again. Too controlled. “Yes.”

“He said his father trusted very few people by the end, and you were one of them.”

For one second, nothing happens.

Then Dalton laughs. It’s not loud. It’s not happy. It’s the kind of laugh that comes out when something is too old to still be funny and somehow still manages to be.

“Of course he said it like that.”

I lower the toast. “Like what?”

“Like trust was something his father handed me instead of something everyone else lost.”

The sentence is so careful that I know it is probably the mild version.

I sit back. “He sounded resentful.”

“He was.”

“He didn’t show it much.”

“No. Alester doesn’t show most things.”

“Were you close to his father?”

Dalton looks down at his coffee. I don’t expect him to answer.

Then he says, “I was useful to him.”

I make a face. “That’s a horrible answer.”

“It’s an accurate one.”

“No, it’s a Dalton answer. That is different and worse.”

His mouth twitches.

Good. Not enough, but good.

I soften my voice a little. “Were you close?”

He’s quiet for long enough that I regret asking.

Then he says, “At the end, yes.”

I think about Alester in his office, saying his father trusted Dalton, and underneath that, something else. A boy who grew into a man and still somehow remembered where he had not been chosen. A son watching a doctor become necessary.

“That must have been hard for Alester,” I say.