Chapter 131 - Chapter 132; Aftermath 12

What he saw in them stopped something in his chest. Behind the careful composure she maintained as a matter of long habit, there was fear, open and unguarded, flickering in the gray-silver of her gaze like weather gathering over unstable ground. Fear that she was not enough. That the accumulated weight of her history, what had been done to her body, what had been taken from her, what she could no longer offer, diminished her in his view. Fear that what they were building together would not hold under the pressure of honest examination. Fear that the future she had cautiously, tentatively begun to imagine for them both would dissolve before it solidified into something real.