Home Entertainment Game Technology Six months after a bullet left me paralyzed, my fiancée secretly ordered the staff to stop my afternoon therapy because she believed helping me was pointless, but the exhausted aide earning twenty-five dollars an hour refused to treat me like a lost cause. I had spent my life surrounded by men terrified of my name, yet it took one brutally honest woman washing my back to make me realize the person wearing my engagement ring had already abandoned me.352

“She told the agency and the therapist's office that afternoon sessions were exhausting you.”

“I never said that.”

“I know.”

“What else?”

Tessa stared at the water.

“Tessa.”

“She said continuing at the current intensity doesn't matter anymore.”

The room seemed to shrink.

“What exactly did she say?”

Tessa's jaw tightened.

“That the family needs to accept reality.”

I looked at my legs.

I had spent six months pretending I hated hope because hope was humiliating.

Hope made you count toes that didn't move.

It made you celebrate sensations that might be phantom nerves.

It made you watch other patients leave rehabilitation on crutches while you learned how to transfer onto a toilet.

Hope could reduce a man to begging his own body for one twitch.

I had called it weakness.

But hearing Arya throw mine away without asking me felt like being shot a second time.

“She canceled it permanently?”