Page 22 of Hidden Truths

Kellen shot a glare at Dr. Clift.

He wavered, put out a hand. Everyone stopped. They exchanged amazed, concerned glances.

Ha! Kellen still had that Army-officer command look. Now she tried her command voice. “Harrison, you can’t die now. Not after all you’ve gone through.”

He tried to counter her Army-officer command voice with his ownI’m an important manvoice. “I don’t know you. I didn’t give you permission to call me by my first name.”

“I know you. And I know Megan.” Kellen turned her back to the medical staff, excluding them from the conversation. She had Harrison’s attention, and she intended to keep it. “If you kill yourself, you’ll condemn Megan to a lifetime of remorse.”

He told Kellen what he’d been telling himself. “She’s young. She’ll realize I did it for her.”

“You don’t believe that.” Kellen concentrated on him to the exclusion of everyone and everything. “Better than anyone, you know her background. She’ll blame herself. Convince herself she wasn’t enough. She’ll lead a life to make you proud, and she’ll die alone.”

Kellen must have hit a nerve, because he snapped, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Captain Kellen Adams. I served in the Army with men and women who lost their legs, their arms, their eyesight. Every one of those men and women did what they had to do to go forward with their lives.” She pulled out all her experiences to try to reach him—and he was hearing her. “What kind of man won’t listen when the woman he loves wants to help him? What kind of man tells himself he deserves to die? A coward!”

“You don’t understand. No one understands.” Harrison held up his hated prosthetic arms and shook them. “This is my fault. I wasn’t wounded in any noble cause. I worked too long at the office. I could have got a cab, but no. I was going home, and I was the man in control.” He laughed bitterly. “I was tired. I fell asleep, I crashed my car and I woke up half a man.”

Of course. That made sense. He had created the problem, now he intended to fix it. “You’re not half a man. You’re simply not the man you were before.”

“I won’t take less.”

“Harrison Benchley, handsome, strong, self-made man, a philanthropist, a lover.” She mocked him. “You made yourself a person to be envied. Suddenly—no one envies you.” Not true, but she flung his thoughts at him, bringing them out to air.

“They pity me. All they can see when they look at me are these.” He allowed his arms to sink to his sides.

“What do you care what they think, what they see? Aren’t you the man who always says, ‘What they think of me is none of my business?’“

His chest rose and fell as if he wanted to reply but had no words.

Kellen asked, “Do you know what Megan does every day at this time?”

“She’s at work.”

“She works at this hospital.”

“No, she doesn’t.” But for the first time, he looked around him and saw people: the doctors, the nurses, the med techs. He looked beyond them, too, and saw the woman, her face covered by a surgical mask, standing alone by the nurses’ station. The mask could no longer hide her from him; he knew her.

Kellen told him, “She comes every day to watch you walk past. Just to see you.”

“No.”

Kellen drew on the knowledge she’d been given. “When you proposed, you swore you’d always be there for her. You promised you would love her in this life and the next. That’s how you convinced her to marry you. Harrison, you’re breaking her heart, and that heart, once broken, cannot be mended.”

He wasn’t really listening to Kellen anymore.

Because Megan had pushed the mask down and off her face, and stood staring at him.

He took a step toward her. In the silence of the corridor, his voice carried. “Why are you here?”

Megan answered just as clearly. “You can reject me, but you can’t make me stop loving you.”

“I didn’t reject you because I don’t love you. I did it—”

“For my own good?” Megan gave a laugh that broke in the middle. “Don’t lie to yourself, Harrison. Our whole relationship was built on what you could do for me. I tried to tell you it didn’t have to be that way, but you didn’t listen, and this!” She pointed at his arms. “This changed everything.”

“I know. I know.” He held up his hands and looked at them in revulsion. “Mechanical. Unfeeling. A lousy substitute for real flesh. I don’t even have two arms to hold you.”

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