Watson swallowed, hard. His throat felt dry, and there seemed to be a lump in it, which was inconvenient in the extreme. How could he possibly ask this aloud? Still, he had begun. He had to finish it.

"Did I--" He stopped, broke off, pulled the blanket tighter around him. Briefly, he wished he had bothered to stop and find his discarded nightshirt. "Did I mean so little to you that it was easy for you to disappear like you did?"

And that was, at the heart of it, what scared him; that disappearing, dying, had been easy for Holmes, that he would do it again if necessary, that always could be truncated to mean whatever was convenient as necessary.