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

“Why?”

I looked past her at Tessa.

Because I finally understood.

For most of my life, people had stood when Vincent Corvino entered a room.

They stood because of contracts.

Money.

Fear.

That day, for the first time, I understood there was another kind of standing.

The kind that hurt.

The kind no one applauded.

The kind you did when you finally stopped asking the world to carry the weight of what your name had done.

My knees buckled.

Tessa caught my elbow.

Mara caught the other.

And between the two sisters I had every reason to lose and no right to ask forgiveness from, I stayed upright.

For the first time in my life, Vincent Corvino stood because the people he had once failed refused to let him fall.