He shrugged. There was something genuine in the hesitation, something that had not been prepared or thought through in advance. “Because nobody else did.”
That was all.
After graduation, Emily’s family relocated for the extended rehabilitation programs that the next two years would require. Whatever thread might have connected her to Marcus snapped with the distance the way these things do, and she assumed that was simply the ending of that story: one good moment, one song, a boy who was kind once at exactly the right time. She filed it away as precisely that and tried not to add more to it than it was.
She carried it anyway.
The rehabilitation was long and honest and uncinematic. She learned to transfer from the chair without assistance. She learned to walk short distances with braces and eventually longer ones without them. She learned, more slowly than any of the physical skills, that the people around her tended to conflate surviving with being finished, to mistake the absence of visible struggle for the end of interior work. She was not finished. She would not be finished with the interior work for years more, and even then it would be ongoing rather than complete.
She also developed, gradually and with real fury, a catalogued understanding of how badly most buildings failed the people inside them. The ramp placed beside the loading dock entrance because it was easier than redesigning the front of the building. The accessible bathroom that technically met code and practically announced to anyone who needed it that their presence was an afterthought rather than an expectation. The doors and routes and entrances designed for legal compliance rather than human welcome. She paid attention to every one of these failures with the detailed memory of someone who had no choice but to pay attention because her body required it.
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