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

Her face hardened.

There.

The real Arya.

Not the woman from Lake Como.

Not the woman who had slept with her palm on my chest the night my father died.

This one.

Cold.

Tired.

Angry that I had made surviving inconvenient.

“You don't understand what it's been like.”

I almost laughed.

“For you?”

“Yes, for me.”

“You were going to have me declared incompetent.”

“You were unstable.”

“I was shot.”

“You screamed at nurses.”

“I couldn't feel my legs!”

“You refused psychiatric medication.”

“Because I wasn't depressed enough for you?”

She flinched.

I saw I had hit something real.

Then she said quietly, “Dominic said the company was collapsing.”

“So you took it?”

“I protected what was left.”

“For whom?”

Her lips trembled.

“Us.”

“Calder Blue belongs to you.”

Silence.

The wineglass in her hand began to shake.

“How do you know that?”

Wrong answer.

The last part of me that still wanted to believe her died.