As it turned out, I didn't have to come up with an excuse to give Mulder. When I got up the next morning, I heard Josh on the phone, telling Mulder that I wouldn't be going to Denver because I was sick.

I couldn't hear Mulder's half of the conversation, of course, but I could tell from what Josh was saying that Mulder didn't believe him.

"I don't care what she looked like yesterday, Mr. Mulder," Josh said. "She's sick today. She's been vomiting all morning."

There was a pause. "No, you can't talk to her right now," Josh said. "She's in the bathroom."

Well, that was a lie. I was in the kitchen, making Josh's breakfast. He hated cold cereal, hated pastries; all he would ever eat was bacon, eggs and toast, the bacon completely crisp, the eggs over easy with the yolks intact, and the toast hot but not burned.

Once, just for variety, I'd made him some blueberry muffins, but he took one bite and told me that they weren't very good.

Well, what he actually said was that I made them "the wrong way."

"You don't put all that crumbly stuff on them," he'd said. "And you're supposed to use more berries. They're too sweet, too. I'll write to my sister and get my mother's recipe. She knew how to make them."

I hadn't tried any other recipe, of course; I'd just decided it would be easier to make him what he liked, and save myself the trouble. My mother always made breakfast for my father, when he was home -- which he seldom was -- and she was very careful to make things exactly the way he liked them. She taught me to do the same.

I told myself this was no different.

Somehow, though, in a way I couldn't quite define, I knew that it was -- very, very different.

But I never made blueberry muffins for breakfast anymore, and that was too bad, because I really like them.

So now, I was carefully breaking the eggs into a pan with way too much butter melted in it, because I couldn't figure out any other way to keep from breaking the yolks. He wouldn't eat them if they were broken, and then we'd have to drive to the Hoover building in a tense silence because he was hungry, and it was my fault.

"She'll talk to you when she gets back to work," Josh was saying into the phone as I ground the coffee beans, working on autopilot. I felt calmer, somehow, having work to do with my hands, but inside I still felt numb and dead.

And my face was a mass of bruises.

"Yeah, I'll be sure and give her the message," Josh said, sarcastically, leaving me to wonder just what message Mulder might have wanted to give me. I was pretty sure Josh wasn't going to tell me.

Josh hung up the phone, laughing.

But then he looked at me, and it was as though he'd never seen me before.

"Oh, my God, Dana," he said, stricken. "Oh, Dana, sweetie, oh, Jesus ..."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't think of anything to say.

"Oh, Dana, baby, did I do that to you?" he whispered, coming closer to me. I shrank away from him, but he put out his hand and touched the injured side of my face, very carefully, very gently, and tears started up in his eyes.

"Oh, God, baby, I am so sorry," he said, and his voice was shaking. "I never meant to hurt you. You have to believe that. I can't believe I did that to you."

"You're the one who did it, Josh," I said, and I felt myself starting to cry again. "You hit me. You said I had been asking for it."

"Baby, you know I didn't mean that," he said, softly, still caressing my face. "I love you. You know I love you. It's just that ... well, everything's been so hard lately, and when I smelled that cologne on you, and I heard you saying you were leaving me, well ... I just snapped. I've never done anything like that before. I don't know what came over me."

"Don't, Josh," I said, turning away from him. "Please don't."

"No, Dana, please, you've got to talk to me," he said, taking my arm and pulling me back toward him. He sounded desperate. "Please, baby, please talk to me. I can't stand it if you won't talk to me. I can't even imagine living like that. Please, Dana."

He sounded so despondent, and his face was such a mask of misery that I began to be ashamed of my hard-heartedness. Clearly, he wasn't trying to pretend that I had deserved any of this, and he wasn't in denial; he knew what he had done was wrong, and he was absolutely horrified by it.

I felt so sorry for him right then, standing there looking as though he'd lost his last friend ... which, I suppose, he had, if I refused to forgive him.

And to refuse forgiveness when it had been sincerely asked for was a sin. That's what I was taught as a child, and I still believed it.

There was no other morally acceptable choice. I had to forgive him.

"Josh," I began, slowly, and he looked at me, almost eagerly, like a puppy that's been hit but returns again to its master, full of hope.

"Josh, I don't know if we can get over this and go on," I said. "But I know you can't go on the way you are. You're falling apart over being unemployed, and I hope you see now that you're hurting both of us."

"I do see it, Dana, but I don't know what to do," he said, helplessly. "I try and I try to find work; I want you to be proud of me, and look up to me the way a woman is supposed to look up to a man, but I just go on, week after week, living off you like some parasite. I've never lived off a woman in my life, and I can't stand it."

That touched me, although he was clearly going to need some consciousness-raising over his old-fashioned ideas about men and women. For the first time, I gave him a little smile, ignoring the pain in my face as I did so.

"You need counseling, Josh," I said, softly, taking his hand and holding it. He looked at me gratefully. "If you want, I'll ask the social worker at the Bureau to recommend someone."

"No," he said, quickly. "I don't want anyone there to know this happened. They don't need to know, because it's not going to happen again, Dana; I swear it's not. But I'll find a counselor on my own, I promise. I'll find one before the end of the day, and maybe we could go together."

That was an encouraging sign. Most men wouldn't have the sensitivity to realize that couples' problems are best dealt with as a couple. The fact that he wanted me included told me that he was committed to making it work for us, as a couple.

"All right," I said. "We'll go together."

He beamed at me then, and took me in his arms.

"I swear before God, Dana," he whispered, holding me close. "I swear, I'll never, ever let anything happen to you, not ever again. I promise."

I wanted so badly to believe him.

~~~~~~~~

Mulder, as it turned out, was in Denver for more than a week. He checked in with me regularly by e-mail and by phone, asking how I was and what was up with the X Files investigations, but never asked about Josh or anything connected to my personal life.

It was just as well that we didn't talk long. With Mulder gone, Josh called me almost constantly, reasoning -- I suppose -- that I could now spend almost the entire day on the phone.

As a result, I didn't have much to report to Mulder, work-wise.

At the end of the week, he called to say that he hadn't been able to reach any conclusions on this case and would be back in D.C. by Saturday, that he would see me Monday and in the meantime, I could reach him at Daniel's apartment in Baltimore.

If I needed him.

That was all he said. I thanked him, and said I'd see him Monday.

After that, I went upstairs to the ladies' room and examined my bruises carefully; they were fading. Thank goodness I'd been able to stay hidden away all week in the basement office where no one else would ever go; that was the only way I'd managed to escape detection so far.

Mulder wouldn't know what had happened.

I didn't want him to know; he wouldn't understand that this wasn't the real Josh, that Josh had simply been pushed by stress and fear and other circumstances into this terrible loss of temper.

But Josh had been so sweet and so loving since that terrible afternoon, and I was feeling good about my decision to stay with him. Clearly, the violence had been an aberration; he'd been so shocked at it, so apologetic, had taken the blame so completely, and now he couldn't seem to do enough to show me how sorry he was.

The counselor he'd consulted had seemed well-qualified, but turned out not to be such a good choice, after all. Josh told me that the counselor canceled two appointments in a row after the first one, without giving Josh any notice at all, so that Josh twice drove to the man's office only to find that he wouldn't be seeing him after all.

But Josh took it with unusual good humor, just shrugged and said he'd find another counselor and that I shouldn't worry about it.

Then he used up the last of his savings to take me out to dinner that night, and flowers had arrived at my office two mornings ago, with a note attached saying how much he loved me.

Things were working out very well, indeed, and I was looking forward to Mulder's return. It was time he and Josh got to know each other, so this hostility between them could end and they could begin to become friends, the way Daniel and I had.

The thought of Daniel sent a pang through me. I hadn't laid eyes on him since that night in Miami, and I missed him terribly. I kept remembering Daniel's kindness to me, his laughter, his compassion; I remembered, too, the comfort of his arms, the warmth of his kiss, the frank admiration in his eyes as I dissected that poor, mutilated corpse and described, calmly and in careful detail, just how the unfortunate girl had died.

"You're a good pathologist, Dana," he'd said, looking down at me from his 6-foot-3 inch height, and putting his arm around me. "Damn good."

That had felt so wonderful. Daniel is one of the Navy's foremost surgeons, and he's never been the most emotionally open person on earth -- neither am I, for that matter -- so praise from him consequently means just that much more to me.

I felt lonely without him, in a way I'd never thought I would. In just two years, Daniel had become an essential part of my life, and his absence left a huge, aching void.

But I wasn't unhappy, no matter what Mulder thought. I mean, how could I be, when Josh loved and needed and worshipped me the way he did?

Of course I was happy.

Of course I was.