“The body has a way of stopping when the soul refuses to, Marcus. You should have forced him to sleep.”

Sister Teresa’s voice was uncharacteristically sharp as she stood in the sterile, white-washed hallway of St. Luke’s Medical Center. The air here didn’t smell like jasmine or rain; it smelled of rubbing alcohol, industrial floor wax, and the cold, metallic scent of machinery. It was a place of clinical precision, a harsh contrast to the messy, vibrant life of the orphanage they had shared just days before.

Marcus leaned against the wall, his head in his hands, his expensive charcoal suit jacket discarded on a nearby plastic chair like a...