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knew him to help him through all of this.
    “Then how... I know enough to know that that is not typically how the world works.” He rubbed his hand over his chin, his skin scraping against the whiskers there. The sound was...strangely erotic.
    Rose had no experience with men. Not intimate experience. Beyond that single chaste kiss on their wedding day, and the strangely arousing experience of putting his T-shirt on him, she hadn’t really had any physical contact with a man. Why would she? She had been waiting for Leon. Fool that she was.
    As a result, she imagined she was a bit more affected by everyday things than a woman with greater experience would be. Looking at the situation with a little bit of distance she felt sorry for herself. Poor, innocent Rose quivering over whiskers.
    Too bad she had no distance in the situation. She had...longing that she could do nothing about, sadness that never seemed to go away, that permeated her entire being and settled a heaviness over her chest, and a deep fear that Leon would never remember anything. Coupled with an almost equally deep fear that he would remember everything and she would have to leave this house, leave him, and move forward with her goal of independence. Of letting go of her feelings for him.
    “I’m fuzzy on the details, and I’m sorry about that,” she said, trying to ignore the heat in her cheeks. “All I know is that you were working for my father, for his company. In a very low-level position. You were a teenager. You had not graduated from school. Instead, you left and went straight into the workforce. You did something at the company to catch my father’s eye, and from there he began to mentor you. He took a very personal interest in you, and he began to groom you to be his protégé.”
    “My family wasn’t rich,” he said, a strange, hollow look taking over his eyes. “I know that. I’m from Greece. We were very poor. I came here by myself.”
    It struck her then, how little she knew about him. She knew he was Greek, that much was obvious, but she didn’t know about his background, not really. She was struck then how little she knew him at all.
    He had appeared in her life one day like a vapor and she had hero-worshipped him from that moment on.
    That is, until she had fully realized that he would never quite conform to the fantasy she had built around him in her mind. She didn’t wonder why he had married her. The perks of the union were obvious. Her father had been dying, and he wanted to see her settled. He had offered the company and the estate as incentives to Leon, and had put a time frame on the union likely to make sure the two of them gave it an adequate enough try.
    All of that made sense. But she suddenly realized that she was the one who didn’t make sense. What had she been hoping for? What on earth had she possibly thought would come from all of this? Who did she imagine he was? That was the problem. All of it was imaginary.
    As she sat here in the library attempting to reconstruct who Leon was for his own sake, she realized just how much of the puzzle she was missing.
    It made her feel... It made her feel small. Selfish. As if she had only ever seen him as an object of fantasy, who lived and breathed to serve her girlish dreams.
    “Are you all right?” he asked.
    She blinked. “Yes. Do I not look all right?”
    “You look as though you have been hit across the face with a mackerel.”
    She tried to laugh. “Sorry. It’s just... I don’t actually know as much about you as I should. When confronted with the gaps in your memory I’m forced to examine the missing pieces of my knowledge.”
    He frowned. “I suppose I bear some part of the blame in that. If not most of it.”
    “I don’t think that’s true. I think in this case the fault is squarely mine.”
    “I cannot help you with it now. I don’t have answers to any of the questions.”
    “I don’t expect you to,” she said, feeling rather weak and pale.
    “I do