The Glasshouse

Remo Valli sells grief. His mourning company weeps on cue in the great houses of Vallenza while he reads their locks and ledgers. Because his own reflection was sold and spent years ago, mirrors hold nothing of him — and he alone can see the faint seam where a borrowed face has been stitched on. At a spice-broker's funeral he sees the seam on the widow, and under it the face of the sister he buried in his mind twelve years ago. Pulling that thread will cost him a city.