Leaving had been the hardest thing she'd ever done. She'd left the only true family she'd ever had behind. Had left him behind. It had filled her with pain to look into his confused eyes and tell him that she was leaving. It was nothing compared to the ache that slowly killed her when he never came, not to tell her goodbye or to even convince her to stay.

It had taken every last drop of strength she possessed in her body to walk down the gang plank and to the vehicle loaded with her possessions. The vehicle that would take her to the Guild house and away from her family and Serenity, the only home she'd ever really known.

Her head told her that if he cared for her the way he had his crew that he would never have called her the horrible names he did. At first his usage of “whore” had stung, but over time it became a knife twisting in her heart until she thought she would die from the pain.

What hurt the most was knowing that he would share what she so longed for with Nandi, a woman, while wonderful in her attributes was more the name he so lightly used for her. He took what Nandi had to offer with more thought than what she gave to him on a daily basis.

She knew that day while in Nandi's spare room that to him she was nothing but a whore, no worse than the girls at the bordello, but certainly no better. She was nothing to him, but the role she played on Serenity as its ambassador.

Many of the girls wondered why since her return she had set up no appointments with anyone, client or otherwise. She couldn't tell them that the thought of someone touching her other than him turned her stomach. That even with all his hatred and cruelty toward her, she wanted no one else, that she loved him and always would.

Even know looking out over the city from her balcony she could picture his eyes and they way that they twinkled the few times she had ever fully seen him laugh. Could picture him ruffling Kaylee's hair, when he was in a rare playful mood, or bickering with Jayne over the choice of weapon