<span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff9999">Castelis shook her head, instinctively. In some ways, she’d always tried to protect him, to reassure him. But that sort of attitude had lead them to where they were now. </span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff4d4d">“Both.”</span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff9999"> she said softly, dragging her knees up to her chest.</span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff4d4d"> “The night you nearly killed me.” </span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff9999">it was partly true, the more she thought about it. But not because he’d almost killed her. Because he’d almost killed the child she was carrying. The one she couldn’t make up her mind to tell him about. She’d made the choice before then to leave… but she’d been going to tell him she was going away for a while. </span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff4d4d">“I didn’t… want to  tell you that you’d scared me… I didn’t want you to think i was weak. I told Limuria i needed a leave of absence…”</span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff9999"> she wasn’t looking at him, couldn’t, though not because she was lying. All of what she was saying was true. </span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff4d4d">“But when I came back… the man i’d left behind was gone.”</span>