She nodded slowly. The real pain probably went deeper than the gash he’d sustained. The real pain was in the heart and the soul--the two areas Landel seemed to be trying to strike at the hardest with all of the mind games he played.

Would it help to say something as trite as ‘don’t worry, I understand, I’ve done this before’? That she had wrapped up wounds before, that she had faced impossible odds before, that she’d sat with friends while they’d been devastated by desperate circumstances? That she knew, without a doubt, that one day the pain would become strength rather than a cause for sadness?

“Is it the symptoms today?” she asked.