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

Men who had avoided my bedroom suddenly remembered my phone number.

I stopped answering.

Something had changed.

I was tired of people who arrived only when my name became useful again.

Tessa remained.

Three months later, I stood between parallel bars with braces locked around my knees.

Patel hovered beside me.

“You have it?”

“Yes.”

Tessa stood at the far end.

She was no longer my aide.

The day Arya left, I had offered to hire her privately at triple the rate.

She refused.

“Bad boundaries,” she'd said.

So she finished her agency contract, trained the replacement caregiver, and left.

But twice a week, she still came for coffee.

Sometimes she attended therapy if I asked.

That afternoon, snow pressed white against the windows.

I gripped the bars.

One step.

Drag.

Breathe.

Another.

Not normal walking.

Maybe never normal.

But movement.

Choice.

Forward.

Tessa's eyes shone.

“Don't you dare cry,” I warned her.