He talked about the accident, the blood, the weeks he spent sleeping beside her hospital bed. He described the terror of watching doctors move her unconscious body. Those things were true.
Lydia did not deny them.
Fear had been part of what happened.
It was simply not the whole of it.
“At first,” Charles said, “I wanted every treatment available.”
“What changed?”
He looked down.
“You started getting hurt by hope.”
“No. You started getting frightened by what I might do if I needed you less.”
Charles’s face tightened.
“That is cruel.”
Lydia almost laughed.
For years he had used the possibility of hurting him to make her question herself.
Now he was doing it in a room where everyone could see the mechanism.
“I’m not here to punish you,” she said. “I’m here because I need to hear whether you understand what you did.”
“I protected you.”
“No.”
The answer came easily this time.
“You protected the version of me you could control.”
Charles stood as if the chair had become unbearable.
The therapist asked him to sit.
He refused.
Lydia watched him pace to the window.
For one strange second she remembered being six years old and running across that same estate lawn before the accident, chasing him because he had promised to teach her how to fly a kite.
The memory did not disappear because of what he became.
That was one of the hardest truths.
People did not need to be monsters every minute to do monstrous damage.
Charles turned back.
“I was afraid of losing you.”
Lydia nodded.
