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

“Not the concrete.”

Her fingers tightened around the cane.

“I remember being thirsty.”

My chest tightened.

“I kept asking for water, and the paramedic couldn't give me any because they thought I'd need surgery.”

Her eyes grew wet.

“For three hours I could hear men above me arguing about cranes and legal clearance while I was so thirsty I thought I would die from it.”

I couldn't breathe.

Mara leaned forward.

“You probably signed that paper in ten seconds.”

“Yes.”

“I lived inside those ten seconds for fourteen months.”

There was nothing to say.

So I didn't.

For once in my life, I allowed silence to belong to someone else.

Mara looked toward her sister.

Then back at me.

“Tessa says you're trying to become different.”

“I am.”

“Don't do it for us.”

“I won't.”

“Don't do it because you got hurt.”

I nodded.

“Then why?”

I thought about Arya.