You’ve realized, rather something like what happens when a jeep crashes into your fiancé’s side of his car as he is about to tell you his real identity, that maybe your viewing your life through a piece of glass.

”For starters, my name isn’t Michael Vaughn."

Who the hell are you, then?

You ask yourself this question silently as you sit emotionlessly by his bed in the hospital room you both share and it continues to run around in your mind as you stare at his battered face.

The car accident, your father informed you an hour or so ago, was really an accident and it just affirms, in your mind, that everything is delicate. You don’t know if he’ll wake up and tell you what he said was a joke, and you don’t know if you can get passed another suspected betrayal. You don’t know his real name.

You do, however, know that your father knows something. He could scarcely look you in the eye has he gave you the news of the accident, and you know that if Vaughn’s (you refuse to call him anything else at the moment) confession was dangerous to you, there was a snowball’s chance in hell that Vaughn would be alive right now.

You can’t get the sight of the implosion of the driver’s side window after the crash out of your head and it’s another symbol of the fragility of every situation. You’ve had this image of Vaughn in your head for six years. The first year you met him, he was an honorable man, almost other worldly. That image cracked some the year you came back from the dead. He was a man that makes mistakes, and, as you found out That Day of the Car Accident, he is a man with secrets. You spent so much time hoping that everything with him stays the way you want it to that you missed finding out the bigger things about him. He was careful and sneaky and you’re almost proud of him for it because you realize that you are both more alike than you thought. The look on his face in the car told you that he was just as scared of all of this falling out from under him as you were. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell you his secret in the first place.

That’s not to say that you are letting him off of the hook, but you love him, shattered image and all. This scares you, because you don’t know exactly what he was going to tell you and you hope, with all of your heart, that he is still the man you love. Your instincts tell you that he is, though, and you’ve always trusted your instincts.

You plan, when he wakes up and tells you everything, to throw the glass you are standing behind on the ground so that you can stop thinking that everything is going to fall apart at the slightest diversion from your set plan. After Lauren, you did set such a plan and you know that it’s not going to work that way no matter how much you had hoped that it would and while you know that his name may be different, you don’t know the circumstance of the change. For the first time in your life (you have no qualms about admitting this now), you are going to listen before you react.

You hear a soft groan and the emotionless facade that you have been keeping since you awoke in this hospital disappears.

The glass is shattered, but now, it’s on your terms.

End