He scribbled dates down as she mentioned them. He had asked when he'd proposed because he wanted to get a sense of how long their involvement had been, but he was more interested in the date it had ended. This was one possibility that had occurred to him the night before while he'd been pacing around his room thinking it through, but he'd thought it unfair to pin all the blame for it on her unless he had some proof that it was true. But here it was: the dates lined up too well for him to think it a coincidence. She'd left him just ahead of the biggest, longest, hardest brush with his curse he'd had to date.

"No one saw me until February," he pointed out dryly. He assumed she already knew this and was just talking around it for the sake of politeness. She knew about the curse, so there were two possibilities that presented themselves in his mind: either she'd left because she'd known that was coming, somehow — maybe he'd known and had told her, could he have forgotten that too? — or her leaving had caused it. Either way she would have been very much aware of the hell he'd been through. And this was difficult to reconcile: a woman who said their relationship had been magical and special, who said she regretted having left, and yet would let him face all that alone.

"Was I 'sick' when you left?" he asked. He had never been sick, but assumed she would know what he was referring to. If she knew about the curse, she knew how much trouble he had talking about it. "Had it started yet?"

---