“I treated you badly. You did nothing to deserve it. When you gave yourself to me for the first time, I should have held you afterward. It would have been the decent, the honorable thing to do. Instead, I left. I didn’t want to allow myself to be close to you. I’d allowed myself to love once, and after I had to watch Carla die a slow, horrible death, I’d sworn to myself that I wouldn’t let a woman into my life again.”
