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

It cut deep because it was true.

I looked at the band on the floor.

“Put it back.”

Tessa did.

We worked another forty minutes.

Arya noticed the change before anyone else.

Not in my legs.

In me.

I stopped asking where she had been.

Stopped demanding reassurance.

Stopped mentioning the wedding.

I watched.

And when you have spent your life making men nervous, you learn something useful.

Silence makes liars fill the room.

One evening she sat beside me with a glass of wine.

“I was thinking Lake Como for the honeymoon.”

I looked at her.

“Were you?”

She smiled.

“You always wanted Italy.”

“I've been to Italy thirty-one times.”

“Not with me.”

She rested her hand on my shoulder.

It was the first time she'd touched me voluntarily in almost two weeks.

I nearly recoiled.

Instead, I smiled.

“When's your next dress fitting?”

“Friday.”

“Good.”

Relief passed across her face.