I cleared my throat. “Yeah…sorry. I’m just fine. I’m, um, I’m going to do the rest of this in the bathroom. I don’t want to keep you up.”

But she was quickly falling back asleep and I was trying to curb the wild hiccupping of my stomach. I scooped up my laptop and slunk into the bathroom where I sank down onto the floor and let the tears out, finally.

I bent, reached out and grabbed a massive wad of toilet paper from its holder on the wall, burying my face in it to muffle the sobs now unwilling to stay at the pit of my stomach. I felt like I was coming undone. My world was falling apart.

I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. After Adam’s bare and frank admission of his internal misery, his feelings of guilt. His helplessness. What could I say or do that could ever repair that? I stared at the laptop again, as if it were a wild animal about to jump up and bite me.

Knives stabbed at my throat, the backs of my eyes. I wiped my snotty face and took a deep breath. I’d come this far on his wild ride…

I might as well see where it led me. Us.

…And I know that it’s important to you to have a child someday. And if that’s still true when the time comes, then we will find a way. But I was honest when I said that you are enough for me. When I found you, I found what I had been looking for without even knowing it.

Because my life without you…?

And the river, the mountains, the trees, the deep blue sky all faded and I was now in the middle of a barren, gray desert. The landscape was dotted with cactus plants, and sand stretched as far as the eye could see. A lone, arid wind howled through the bushes, blowing tumbleweeds under a blazing, relentless sun. I could almost feel the waves of heat rising off the sand.

It would be emptier, more desolate than this place.

I need you. I’ve always needed you. But that means nothing if you won’t let me in.

The air rushed out of me with a rattle and a hiss, as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I was shaking, but I wasn’t cold. My mouth was dry, but I wasn’t scared.

And I couldn’t look away. Because the desert was fading again and now I was inside a jail cell, a dark prison. Jagged, rough stone walls rose above me in every direction, with only one wall of bars on one side. I used the controls to turn myself around, this way and that. And only on the third try did I notice a small figure in the corner. I recognized her immediately from the latest portion of the secret quest that we had worked on for months.

This was the lost Elvish princess from Dragon Epoch, the one who was the object of the secret quest. She was thin, half starved, dressed in rags, her face full of sorrow. Four magical bonds held her down, one on each arm and leg. She looked up at me with pleading eyes full of misery.

The cell dissolved and I was now in a room with two doors. Two choices.

Which one will you choose? If we are going to be together, we both have to pick the same one, make the same choice. We have to decide, in spite of all that has gone on between us in the past, in spite of how hard it gets, that our love is tougher than any of the obstacles that have almost impeded it.

Everything faded to black and there was nothing but an old-style green cursor, blinking against the black background with just one symbol at the prompt. A question mark.

I typed, wondering where it would lead. Would it send him a text or some other type of alert? Would it trigger some other crazy effect in this strange little game he had led me through?

With a deep breath, I tapped out the words.

I choose us. Forever.

My computer was at the desktop again. I waited, not really knowing where my message had gone or if I’d get a response. I thought through the strange, fantastic journey I’d just been led through, particularly moved by that image of the princess, pinned down by her bonds, looking up at me with misery in her brilliant green eyes. She was just like me—in a prison of her own making.

My eyes were half closed in reverie when suddenly they flew open and I sat up straight with shock at that realization. The princess was just like me!

“Four bonds. Four allies,” I muttered to myself, furiously typing commands into my computer. My heart was racing. Before I’d left for Anza, we’d been stuck at what I was certain was the final step of the secret quest for weeks.

I punched in the commands to log in to the game and it came to the log in screen, flashing the fancy intro graphics and video. In a frenzy, I hit the escape button to skip all that and selected my character from the screen.

The last time I’d logged in to the game with my friends, we’d made it to just outside the jail cell. We could see the princess inside and I’d wondered at the time why she had four bonds holding her down while still locked inside a cell.