If I’d said the words—if I hadn’t taken it for granted that he must have known I loved him—would he be with me now? Safe in my arms and I safe in his? If he had truly understood how I felt about him, if he had known he had dominion over my heart as well as body, he could never have feared I would think less of him for…anything. But I had never given him reason to trust me. And everything I had given had been too little, offered too late, at a time when the world had already stripped him of too much.
