The horsewoman and tennis player and grav skier from whose brain stem an artificial shunt ran to her life-support chair’s control systems and who, below the neck, aside from that, now had seventy-five percent use of one hand. Period. Total. All there was and all there ever would be again, for as long as she lived.

He’d come apart. He didn’t know how Emily had survived his collapse, his guilt, his sense of failure. No one could change what had happened to her or make things “right,” but it was his job to make things right! It was always anyone’s job to make things “right” for the people he or she loved, and he’d failed, and he’d hated himself for it with a bitter virulence whose memory shocked him even now.

But he’d put himself back together again. It hadn’t been easy, and he’d needed help, but he’d done it. Of course, it was an accomplishment which had come with a layer of guilt all its own, for he’d turned to Theodosia Kuzak for the help he’d needed. Theodosia had been “safe,” for she’d known him literally since boyhood. She was his friend and trusted confidante, and so—briefly—she had become his lover, as well.

He wasn’t proud of that, but he’d run out of strength. An Alexander of White Haven understood about duty and responsibility. An Alexander was supposed to be strong, and so was a Queen’s officer, and a husband, and he’d tried to be strong for so long, but he just couldn’t anymore. And Theodosia had known that. She’d known he had turned to her because he’d had to, and because he could trust her… but not because he loved her. Never because of that. And because she was his friend, she’d helped him find the broken bits and pieces of the man he’d always thought he was and glue them back together into something which almost matched his concept of himself. And when she’d reassembled him, she’d shooed him gently away in a gift he knew he could never hope to repay and gone back to being just his friend.

He’d survived, thanks to Theodosia, and he’d discovered something along the way—or perhaps rediscovered it. The reason for his anguish, the intolerable burden which had broken him at last, was the simplest thing in the world: he loved his wife. He always had, and he always would. Nothing could change that, but that was what had made his agony bite so deep, the reason he couldn’t forgive himself for not somehow making things “all right” again… and the reason he’d had to turn to someone else to rebuild himself when the collapse came. It had been cowardly of him, in many ways, but he simply could not have made himself dump his weakness, his collapse on her shoulders while she coped with everything God had already done to her. And so he’d run away to Theodosia until Theodosia could heal him and send him back to Emily once more.