In the beginning, she had thought it would only be a matter of time until they started sleeping together. She hadn't even imagined it being a drunken sex thing, just some long late night with nowhere else to go at the end but home with each other. Inevitable, she had thought. She had been wrong.

She came home with him in the cab from the hospital to make sure that he got up to his apartment in one piece. So much of him had been shattered lately, she wanted to do as much as she could to preserve what was left. The window that he had finally admitted to breaking was the first thing they both saw when they shuffled silently inside the door. It had been hastily taped up with tape and plastic, but the gaping wound remained, just like the one on his hand.

They had done a better job with his hand at the hospital than he'd done with the window in his apartment. He had asked her to sit with him while the doctor had done the stitches. The last time he'd been in the hospital, she'd barely been able to look at him with an IV in his arm without running to the ladies' room. But he had asked, so she had sat with him in a curtained off section of the emergency room. She hadn't been able to look at his hand while they'd done it, or at his face, his eyes glazed over in dull pain. Instead, she had studied the other hand, the one she had clenched in her lap. Studied the way their fingers laced together, how their clammy palms stuck together, how both sets of knuckles turned white when the needle began its work. She felt his pain, in a literal if not figurative way.

She wanted to stay, but he told her that he'd be fine, that she should go home and get some rest. She had kept her hand entwined with his for the duration of the ER visit and the cab ride, but when they'd come to his apartment, he extracted it carefully, like an animal emerging from a trap, and told her to go home.

She turned to leave, but he caught her on the shoulder with the hand that was now wrapped in a fresh surgical bandage. She thought she could feel the blood flow against her skin, through the gauze and her thick winter coat. "Thank you," he said, "for all of it," and she knew that he knew that she had been the one to go to Leo.

Donna had finally come home with Josh after a long late night, but he hadn't come home with her, and now he never would. He'd always be grateful to her for this, but he'd never forgive her for seeing him at his weakest. She wondered if his hand would scar, and whether the next person to hold it would feel the scar against her palm.