Chapter Forty six
The Softening of Stone
The change in Alexander did not happen like a sudden flash of lightning. It happened slowly, like the way the sun melts the thick ice on the river after a long, cold winter.
When he first came home from the hospital, he was very quiet. He did not look at his big tablet every second of the day. He did not yell at the servants. He walked through the high marble halls of the New York mansion with slow steps, his hand often resting near his chest where the deep pain had been. He looked like a man who had looked into a deep, dark hole and was still afraid of what he saw.
But the biggest change was the way he looked at me.
Before his illness, his eyes were always sharp and cold, like two blue stones that wanted to measure everything I did. He used to
