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

Maybe because no one else could afford to.

I looked at the document again.

“When's Patel coming?”

“Three.”

“Tell nobody.”

For the first time, Tessa looked almost relieved.

“Good.”

“And Tessa?”

“Yes?”

“If you're wrong about this…”

“I know.”

I held up the pages.

“You'd better pray you're wrong.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“No,” she said quietly. “I think you should pray I'm right. Because if I'm right, at least you finally know who you're living with.”

At three o'clock, Dr. Sameer Patel came through the service entrance carrying a therapy bag instead of using the front door.

That alone told me how much my life had changed.

Before the shooting, governors used my front entrance.

Now my physical therapist had to sneak past the kitchen like a teenager.

Patel examined me.

Reflexes.

Strength.

Sensation.

Balance.

Then we worked.

Transfers.

Core stabilization.

Assisted standing.

Sweat crawled into my eyes.