Chapter Eight

Abby tried to sleep as she sat curled up in the chair in Matt Cable's hospital room. They had been talking for many hours before they realized that it was well past visiting hours. The nurse had allowed her to stay in Matt's room overnight, however, on the condition that the two would end their conversation and let Matt sleep.

The strange thing was... she didn't want to go to sleep.

The first few moments with Matt had been very awkward, it was true. She had cried. He had cried. But somehow they had gotten through that. Their conversation went on from there. Abby had been through a lot since Matt had gone into a coma. He listened to her very intently, like a young man did with his girl, not in the disinterested, pretending way the husband of an old married couple would. She took her time explaining everything, and Matt would stop her once a while, asking her to go back to a certain detail he hadn't quite caught, or having her pause her story in order to laugh his old, carefree, masculine laugh once more. She had never realized until that moment just how much she missed that laugh, even though that very same laugh had infuriated her at one time. Matt had such a way about him that put all her most trivial female concerns -- important as they may have felt to her at the time -- into perspective. And he had always been able to make her laugh at it despite herself.

She squirmed now, a smile on her face as she made a half-hearted attempt to give in to her body's exhaustion. She couldn't sleep, though. She was too excited.

The couple's conversation had drifted on to many different subjects throughout the evening, some serious but most of such little importance, apparently, that she could hardly remember what was said. It wasn't important. Not at all. The conversation was the thing. Each conversation seems to take on a life of its own. It will usually begin with a simple question or statement, which may turn into a topic. That topic brings to mind a number of other subjects, which keeps the conversation going as the two conversationalists invest themselves in it. The conversation between the Cables was no different. Except, perhaps, that the two wished it never to end. For the first time in months -- no, years -- they were oblivious to the outside world again, completely happy just to be talking with the other.

Abby laughed quietly to herself as she remembered this evening, the things Matt had said, the old, familiar smile on his face which was just like the smile he had worn when they'd first met in her homeland of Romania. She had been a mere twenty-year-old young woman and he already an experienced man of the world at twenty-nine, a secret agent, no less.

Over the course of the evening and their conversation, Abigail finally began to realize something about Matt that she hadn't perceived at first. He was different, somehow. When the two had first met, Matt Cable was literally her hero. He had saved her life on more than one occasion in those early days. More than that, he was unlike any man she had ever known, except perhaps her father, who had died shortly after her tenth birthday. Yes, Matt was something of a father figure in her life back then, and she was willing to follow him to the ends of the earth if it meant being with him forever. Later on things changed, though. She didn't know exactly when things began to change, but it must have been a year or so after they were married. Things began to equalize, somehow. Matt seemed to have fallen off the pedestal she had put him on, and the two were on even footing. If it had stayed that way it would have been fine, but things continued to change. Slowly, ever so imperceptively slowly, the roles began to reverse themselves. By the end she realized that she had become something of a mother-figure to him. She was the one leading the charge to help Alec, while Matt followed her at first, grumbling every moment, but then finally began to keep to himself and sulk. And by that time she had already fallen out of love with him, though she didn't realize it at the time.

Now, however, the Matthew Cable who slept soundly in the bed only a few inches away was not the man who had fallen into that coma. It was the man who she had married. The hero. As she thought this an image of Alec came into her mind. Abby resisted any temptation to compare the two, as it would have been wrong, but a pang of hurt came to her for the first time in hours. She almost felt the hurt and loss that Alec must have been feeling at that moment. The rage at the men who had taken him away from her. This hurt was tempered by the joy with which Matt had greeted her upon his own return to consciousness.

There was no avoiding it. She had to eventually choose one of them. And she knew it would be cruel to both of them to keep them waiting for too long. But of course, Alec was still away. She knew he was coming back, but the thought of this was no longer joyful to her. For she knew that by that time she would have to make an irrevocable decision about her future. And one of the two men in her life would have to walk away with a broken heart.