So there was my answer. It shouldn’t have gutted me, but it did.

“You don’t want to think it over?” I asked. “Mull the possibility of going?”

“No,” he said. “I can’t. That world, those people, they all know me as an unstoppable force in this city. Everyone thinks I retired, hell, even my own sister has no idea that I’ve had a stroke, and I don’t want her to. Annabelle, I could keel over dead from another stroke at any moment, and the lack of control I have over it eats me alive, every waking moment.”

He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe this was his life.

“I have to live with that every day. I’m not going to ask my sister or you to live with it, too. And as for the world at large, I do not need their pity. Can you even imagine going to a black tie event not knowing if you were going to fall on your face? Christ, the humiliation would kill me.”

I sat up. I wrapped the bedsheets around me to keep warm, but I didn’t think anything could ward off the chill that was creeping through my veins. It felt as if icicles were forming on my heart, and I wondered if it was some self-protection mechanism of which I’d been unaware until this very moment. As if my heart knew that if it was encased in ice, it couldn’t be broken.

“So your image of yourself is more important to you than having your sister back in your life?”

“That’s not what I said,” he snapped.

“Yes, it is,” I argued.

He stood and started to walk away.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “And I can’t explain it to you.”

“Oh, I understand,” I said. The ice around my heart was suddenly being consumed by the fire of my temper. “You’re afraid.”

He snapped back around as if I’d struck him.

“Hell yes, I’m afraid,” he said. He spread his arms wide. “I almost died. One minute I was on top of the world and then wham! Everything was taken from me like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And it could happen again and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

He strode from the room, and I hopped off the bed and followed. We were not done. Not until I had my say. “That’s not what you’re afraid of.”

He whirled around and looked at me with one eyebrow higher than the other. “You’re joking, right?”

“No, I’m not,” I said. He picked his shirt up off the floor and shrugged into it. Sir was asleep on the red throw and didn’t even pop his head up at our raised voices.