t might have almost been funny, if the whole situation hadn't been so lacking in any humor. Him, try to kill her? No. That was the last thing he had done. It hadn't even been a possibility, that little shard of a bullet that would enter into her body. It had been such a small number that he had dismissed it, for it had felt like the same chance as him waking up tomorrow to realize he had gone blind. Now he knew that something about Bree made the numbers different. It was like there was a little warp around her, and it made the impossible happen. Surely there was no one else in the world who could be sitting with him, right here, right now.

"No," he said. "I did not want you dead. I did not even know you would be hit." And that was all he could say. It was all he could offer, and it was probably the most honest thing he had said for as long as they had been talking.

[i]And I saved your life[/i]. He added silently, a trace of bitterness in his mental voice. [i]You don't know it, but you were supposed to die then. And I didn't let it happen.[/i] This whole chase, the whole distortion of his life, in the end it was all his fault. His actions, and Bree, who was somehow able to find him over and over, stand right next to him in the one city in America where he just happened to be, one day before he was planning on leaving.

"My turn for a question," he finally said. "Why didn't you let me go? Why did you even start chasing me in the first place? How did you keep finding me?"

It was, in a way, only one question. The first one was the obvious one, but the last one was the one to which he really wanted to know the answer. They were directly connected to each other in Ethan's mind, and the last could not have been asked without the first.

But, underneath it all, there was a touch of relief. She had accepted his explanation about what he could do. He wouldn't need to make up more excuses, more lies. Maybe, at the end of this all, they would be able to separate, and never see each other again.