All I knew was that I couldn’t lose her. I couldn’t. I listened to her breathing slow as she drifted off into sleep. She felt thinner in my arms. I pressed my cheek against hers, thinking about the tough road she had ahead of her. It would be months and months yet of grueling medical treatments. And this was in addition to the added complication of her pregnancy.

What if she didn’t make it? The numbers were not nearly as good for her type of cancer as for other types of breast cancer. And the younger a patient was, the more dangerous the cancer could be.

Last year this time, just before New Year’s, Emilia was just my online friend, the one whose company I’d so enjoyed, whose blog I loved to read. The one who caused me to find excuses to log on and play with the group. I enjoyed the others, but Emilia was the one who’d kept me coming back again and again.

I could never, ever have imagined how my life would change the day I’d decided to win her auction. I thought that we’d have that trip to Amsterdam, the failed attempt to go through with the auction terms, and then I’d fade back out of her life again. But once I’d spent that time in her presence, I couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let her go. Much as I would have never admitted it to myself at the time, I’d fallen hard and fast. My life was forever changed for the better since she had come into it.

But would she leave me nearly as quickly?

After an hour of these panicked thoughts racing through my mind and my inability to even breathe, I pulled myself away from her and kissed her before adjusting her blinds to keep the room dim. Then I went into the kitchen to grab a bottle of one of Heath’s microbrewery beers. Opening it, I sat down at Emilia’s rig in the alcove to continue with my initial research. I’d spend the rest of the weekend lining up everything we should be doing on Monday—emergency consultation with her doctor, mandatory second opinion, perhaps a third opinion if necessary. And hopefully, if I could convince her, a meeting with her mom.

I jiggled her mouse to wake up her computer. The log-in music to Dragon Epoch was playing—presumably she’d left it on all night. It was at the log-in screen, like Heath had complained about. I went to exit her account from the game when my hand froze.

She’d been playing on a different server and she had a completely new character in the loading screen, a level-four assassin. I blinked and through inexplicable blurring and thick emotion rising in my throat, I read the character’s name. MisterRogers.

She’d unlocked the secret quest. Fitting, since she’d also traveled the impossible labyrinth to firmly implant herself in my heart. She’d stripped me bare of all the secrets I’d cloaked myself in. I was raw and honest and no longer hidden.

Did she have any idea of her power over me? Of what she had done? I was a new man. Emilia had offered me my own red pill and I’d taken it. That red pill was the choice to embrace reality’s painful truth. But as the proverb went, that truth had set me free. It was an unburdening. It was freedom.

I buried my face in my hands and allowed myself that moment of agony that I’d been holding off since I’d first found out about her illness. The tears finally came. They felt like thumbtacks poking the backs of my eyes, my throat. I couldn’t lose her. Not her, too.

My fists clamped into balls of impotent rage, pressing against my leaking eyes. I wanted to throw something. My vision blurred, my mind blurred. How could I think when she was every other thought? How could I breathe without her when she was my breath? How could I live without her when she was my life?

This life. Unpredictable. More puzzling than any game could simulate. One minute you’re at your highest high, only to be sent screaming to your lowest depths. At any turn, it shifts, it changes. And what once was normal is now forever lost in the past.

So I allowed myself five minutes to let it all out and cry like a toddler for the first time since I was a boy watching his dying sister from the bus window. But I couldn’t allow more. I had to be here, be her rock. Be strong for her. For us.

I had a lot to atone for.