Silence reigned for the next few moments; awkwardly stretching the space separating the two bodies whilst they worked out what to say next. Gabriella still hadn't moved from her position by the door and any movement further into the room - further towards him- seemed almost presumptious, almost too familiar to her; as ridiculous as it seemed. Within a period of a few hours barely anything about their relationship remained familiar. Their love was still a binding factor between them, but it had no context: neither knew who the other was or how they were to be handled; at least that was what they thought.

This time it was Troy who made the strenuous first move; opening himself to attack. "I don't understand," he sighed in consternation. "You know about Johnson?"

Gabriella nodded grimly. "Yeah. I've been trying to track him down for the last ... years. He..." she paused in her speech and leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes as she prepared herself to be honest with him about something fundamental in her life for the first time. "My parents didn't die in a car-crash: he killed them."

Troy's eyes widened and his heart convulsed at the complete desolation of her tone. He wanted to reach out to her and offer comfort, but he was not only prevented by his restricted physical movement, but by the invisible wall that had sprung up with the revelation of earlier that evening. It was not words of comfort that left his mouth next, but a question: "Why?"

Agitated and ruined, Gabriella ran her hands over her face tiredly. "I have no idea where to begin," she admitted. Steeling herself, Gabriella risked a look across at him and was once again struck by how weak he looked. "You know, maybe we should leave this for another day." She laughed bitterly. "You're barely out of surgery and this…" she gestured between them vaguely. "This turmoil can't be good for you."

Troy took a deep breath and shrugged despondently. "You're good for me," he said quietly. "I know that. I…We need to talk about this. Now." His voice was firm; despite the awkwardness of the atmosphere, he instinctively knew that she needed him to steer her. His eyes fell on the empty chair a few feet from his bed in a signal to her that she could and should take a seat; and she accepted his silent invitation.

Once seated, Gabriella's eyes darted between him and the floor as she deliberated what to say next. "I was fifteen. I'd gone to the cinema with a friend and two boys; I was so excited because Johnny Green had asked if I wanted to go and he was really cute." As she spoke, her eyes remained trained on the hem of her skirt as she picked at the threads. "I stayed over at my friends afterwards. And then really early in the morning, her parents came to wake me up: my Godfather had turned up and…" She visibly shivered as she recalled the moment. "He was stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting for me. His eyes were so red and he was just pale. Every time I think of grief and fear, I think about how he looked that night. I think part of me knew, as soon as I saw him, what had happened." Hands now shaking too much for her to continue to toy with the material of her skirt, Gabriella clasped them together firmly. She had never told anybody about how she had felt that night. "There had been a fire at our house. It trapped them and they died and…" Her voice failed her as she tried to continue and despite the circumstances and the confusion, Troy couldn't help but reach out to her. He winced as he rolled over slightly so that he was able to brush his hands against her shoulder, but the pain was irrelevant to him. At his touch, Gabriella raised her head and it only took one look into his eyes before she was in his arms. After the initial wave of retrospective grief subsided, Gabriella looked up again and was instantly comforted by the understanding in her husband's eyes; one that told her that she didn't need to continue until she was ready. Gabriella sniffed and blinked the remaining tears from her eyes. "I had never suspected what they did. I knew that they worked together, with my Godfather, and that they worked long hours; but as a young teenager I just never thought to question it. After they died, I moved in with my Uncle Tony. I wasn't dealing well…I just shut down and wasn't eating and…I think that he was scared what would happen if he left me alone. So he started taking me to the company with him. We practically lived there. I don't even really remember when I realized what was really going on. He'd ask me to file things and I suppose little by little I started to get an idea of the sort of things that went down. I think I was still so numb that it didn't really strike a chord, you know?" She shrugged and sighed. "I guess things all came to a head one day when I was in his office. There was an open file on his desk and I was just tidying. I started to read and saw my parent's names. I couldn't stop reading: it was listing all of these cases that my Dad had worked, about his run-ins with Johnson. And then it mentioned the fire. I lost it. I don't even really remember what happened but it ended with my Uncle telling me everything. The company was an undercover agency: espionage and assassination. My parents had had this ongoing feud with Johnson and they'd lost." She gazed at him imploringly. "I'm not a monster. I know that what I do," she paused, "that what we do makes us bad people, but…I…It was never an intentional decision I made. I just fell into it. I wanted to get justice for my parents, and I was just there…surrounded by the business and I just fell into it. It was something that gave me some sort of adrenalin rush and…working numbed the pain and made me forget." The tears fell again as she desperately gulped in air. "I'm not a monster. I'm still me. Please don't hate me…." She begged, clutching his gown.

Troy didn't say anything; his mind seemed to be taking an unnecessary amount of time to process everything that she had said. It was incomprehensible that this back-story could be attached to the woman that he had grown to admire so much. Yet, it didn't make him despise or averse to her; rather it made his admiration for her grow. He cursed how long it had taken for him to respond to her pleas, and pulled her tight against him, tucking her head underneath his chin as he whispered soothing words into her hair. "I could never, ever hate you. Don't you ever think that," he reminded her as he massaged the back of her neck: it had taken a while, but the familiarity of their interaction was returning. "I understand, Gabi," he promised her shaking figure. "I was in the CIA when Dan was killed. I had been assigned to this case involving Johnson and, well, things had started to get involved. We were tracking him for months and then one day I was driving to Coney Island with my brother and the car was rammed off the road, like yesterday." His voice was quiet and deliberate as he recounted the story; despite having heard her own story and seeing the lies that she had told him unravel, and knowing that it didn't diminish his love or desire to be with her in the slightest, he couldn't help but fear that his own confessions would repel her. "When I woke up and they told me that Dan had died, and that Johnson was responsible," he sighed and tried to steady his shaking voice. "I went completely off the rails: I was driven by this need for revenge and I couldn't think of anything else. At first, they wouldn't reinstate my field rating, and then I was suspended. I never went back," Troy admitted. "I sat at home trying to find him for myself and as a means to get by, I took on dirty jobs…it kept building until the dirty jobs became what I did and searching for the bastard became a lower priority." He paused to observe the woman in his arms: she had stopped shaking and was still clutching on to his hospital gown, but she barely displayed any reaction to what he had told her. It petrified him. "Gabriella," he urged; his voice thick with emotion. "Can you please say something?"

She didn't speak, but she did lift her head from where it was nested underneath his chin. Gabriella looked at him, truly looked at him, and stroked a thumb over the battered contours of his face. Their chests felt weighed down by the magnitude of the confessions that they had just shared, and Gabriella tried to force words up her throat and comfort him: she was fighting a losing battle. Just staring at each other, the couple was overwhelmed by how overpowering emotions evoked by the knowledge that for the first time they were looking at each other without the deceptive screen of their lies obstructing the truth. They felt both utterly exposed and yet empowered.

It didn't matter that Troy wasn't the perfect, flawless, uncomplicated person that Gabriella had always thought that she needed to be. The complicity of their emotions and the depth of their connection were simply so much stronger than either could have imagined would ever be possible.

Troy opened his mouth to plea with her to accept him, but he didn't manage to expel a single word before her own awe-inspired voice filled the void between their distant and entwined bodies. "I don't care," she whispered. "I thought that I would, but I don't. You could never be a monster. I understand, I know," she tried to convinced him with her eyes. "And I know that all that is important is how you make me feel." She smiled shyly. "You make me feel like a normal, better person. You make me feel like the sort of person that I want to be."

Troy nodded eagerly, causing his wife to giggle softly. "You reminded me how to properly live. You reminded me that I could escape from this life. You made me want to do it. That's what I was going to say before the crash, Gabi." He shifted his body and grasped her hands in his. "I want out. I want us to finish things with Johnson, and I want us to start over again. You're all that's important to me."

Tears pricked at the corners of Gabriella's eyes again: not because she was disappointed or disgusted or shocked by the revelations of the past hour, but because her fairytale was finally coming true.