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

I leaned back.

“Did you ever intend to marry me after the shooting?”

Her face folded.

For one terrible second, I saw the woman I had loved.

Then she whispered, “I didn't know what my life was going to become.”

I swallowed.

“Neither did I.”

“I was thirty-four, Vincent.”

“And I was thirty-eight.”

“I wanted children.”

“So did I.”

“You don't know if you can—”

She stopped.

Too late.

Something inside me cracked so quietly I almost admired it.

I looked at the ring on her finger.

“My mother's diamond.”

Arya covered it instinctively.

I held out my hand.

“Take it off.”

“Vincent.”

“Take it off.”

She began crying.

Maybe the tears were real.

That's the worst thing about betrayal.

The person who destroys you can still be hurting too.

She slid the ring free.

Placed it in my palm.

Her skin touched mine.

I felt nothing.

“Did Dominic arrange the shooting?”