Chapter 6
Six
ATLAS
Turning the corner, I was flung into the wall by a tiny body, pain lancing up my spine as I collided with the plaster. I did my best to hold in my cry as my legs felt like jelly for a single moment, and then I was steady again.
“Sadie! What did I tell you! Get back here! Are you trying to kill your—”
“Hey.” I turned and grabbed Tollin’s arm before he could rush past me, and I pulled him to a halt. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. It’s been a goddamn year, Atlas, and she’s still not being careful with you.”
Yeah. My niece was the only one not being careful, and I loved her more fiercely for it.
My brother and his wife loved me to the point of it being goddamn unbearable.
Tollin had been my biggest, and obnoxiously loudest, cheerleader in PT, and I could say that his motivation was one of the reasons I was on my feet now.
I wasn’t as steady as I had once been, of course.
My doctor told me it was called walking paraplegia.
It almost felt like an oxymoron until my doctor explained what it meant.
My legs were weak. My spine was damaged permanently.
But I had motor function, and apart from spasms and weird numbness and tingling along nerves running down my legs, I could move the way I did before.
Or, well, that wasn’t true. I was never going to run marathons—not that I would have ever run a marathon.
But my days leaping around a stage were over.
Of course, I also hadn’t set foot on a stage since negotiating the rights and credits to my work, but that was beside the point.
I wasn’t done with music. I was done with the band, but I still had more to give of myself to the fans, once I was brave enough to face them again.
During the negotiations, I’d taken back a third of my catalogue—songs that meant something to me.
Songs that weren’t about Raleigh and the toxic love we’d attempted to share.
He’d fought me on all of them, but I think his lawyers eventually shut him the fuck up because I had the proof that nearly all the music was my intellectual property.
The songs remained on old albums, and I got a decent cut of residuals, and they wouldn’t play them with their baby-faced new lead singer he was absolutely fucking offstage.
I got a decent settlement for the rights to the rest of the music, and I was released without any conditions about future recording contracts.
I’d been contacted several times in the last year of my recovery by different labels who wanted to sign me, but I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go back to that kind of work.
I missed performing. Singing for people was as easy as breathing. Music came to me while I was awake and asleep. But the idea of starting over on my own?
Learning to walk again had been hard. Finding who I was outside of Tender Fracture felt impossible. I would rather spend months and months more in PT trying to will one foot in front of the other than spend another day staring at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out who the fuck I was.
But I needed to reclaim my life. I was ready for it.
I was ready to be on my own, even if my brother wasn’t ready to let me go.
I’d been making noise about moving out for a while now, but every time I did, Tollin panicked and broke down.
I kept caving, but I was ready to let him deal with his own anxiety in a way that didn’t involve me.
I just needed some space to make that happen.
It was almost New Year’s Eve, and he was freaking out more about the anniversary of the accident than I was.
The night I woke up to him tucking me into blankets was when I knew it had to stop.
That me being here was making it worse for all of us.
I had to leave before the anniversary because if I didn’t, he was going to have a meltdown, and I didn’t have the emotional capacity to handle him and whatever grief I was going to feel that night.
I just needed a way to tell him.
Or a way to sneak out so he couldn’t try and stop me.
And that, I realized, was where Tarik would come in. It had taken me a few days to formulate a plan, and a few days after that to convince him to go along with it, but he did understand. He lived close enough that he’d seen the way my brother was spiraling, and he agreed something had to be done.
Now he was here, waiting for me in the kitchen with plans. And plane tickets.
Two weeks ago, I’d woken up from a vivid dream about the ambulance ride with a name on my tongue: Pierce Island. The EMT had said it to me, but I wasn’t sure if it was an elaborate hallucination or not until I looked it up on Google.
It was everything he’d told me it was. One tiny island almost considered Caribbean, accessible by ferry from a few ports, but mainly Savannah.
The ferry went down the Savannah River, out into the Atlantic, and thirteen hours later, it docked just north of Grand Bahama on a sandbar-turned-island that had been a resort town for nearly four decades.
I was taking a huge risk, doing this on my own.
I hadn’t traveled at all by myself since the accident, and while I could traverse flat land without any kind of mobility aid, there were times when my legs just…
gave up. My bladder control was weak too—which I’d discovered after a mortifying accident in Trader Joe’s.
But things were better now, and I wanted to do this to prove to both myself and to Tollin and Lyria that I was ready for my next step. I was done being waited on. I was ready to reclaim the person I was and work on turning him into the person I wanted to be.
Stepping into the kitchen, I smiled at Tarik, who was taking his daughter back from Sadie.
She was obsessed with holding any and all babies since Lyria had announced her new pregnancy.
That was yet another reason I didn’t want to be here for much longer.
Tollin and Lyra needed their space to be a family, and my brother needed to be doting on his children and wife, not me.
“Go play,” I told Sadie, giving her an easy pat on the head.
She looked up at me. “Did I hurt you, Lat-las?”
“No.”
“Yes!” Tollin called from the other room.
“Ignore your dad just this once,” I told her. I walked over to the table and sat, my legs thanking me as I sank down. I beckoned her over and lifted her up. “But you will need to learn to be careful when the new baby comes. The baby will be very small and very fragile.”
“I’m careful,” she said and glanced at Tarik. “Right? I never even once dropped Samira, right?”
Tarik hid a laugh as he adjusted Samira in his arms. She was dead asleep with her little face smashed against his shoulder. “Not even once. You’ve been a very good babysitter.”
“Dad said you use…used to um. That you just babysat Uncle Lat-las when he was just…singing some songs for people.”
Tarik coughed. “I did, yeah. But he was already big then.”
“And he said that you was…that, um…you sawed Raleigh and that he’s a pointless waste of air that—”
“Okay,” I said quickly, easing the five-year-old off my lap. “No more copying what Daddy says.”
She shrugged and ran off, and I let out a breath, rubbing my hands down my face. When I looked back up, Tarik was giving me a look of pure pity.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a tiny thumb drive. “I also think taking this many precautions to hide your tickets from your brother is ridiculous. He hasn’t hacked your computer.”
“Keep your voice down,” I hissed as I slipped the drive into my pocket. “I don’t trust him. I caught him checking my credit card account a few months ago.”
“You people need to learn how to communicate. This sneaking around bullshit is…bullshit.”
I gave him a withering glare. “Samira’s going to internalize those words and have preverbal trauma from her dad’s potty mouth.”
He grimaced at me, then covered her one exposed ear. “Fuck you.”
I burst into laughter and sat back. “Seriously though, thank you.”
“You’re really doing this, huh? This random island in the middle of nowhere? What if it gets hit by a hurricane?”
“It’s December,” I said, waving him off. “And I’m not worried about it. I need this. I…I need to fix my life.”
“Yeah. This has nothing to do with the hot phantom EMT who goes there every New Year’s, right?”
“Not even a little bit.” I bit back a grin. “And if I do happen to find him…we’ll see where the universe takes us.”
“To a judge so he can get a restraining order.”
I flipped him off, and he laughed again. “When I get back, I’m also…” I turned my voice off and mouthed, ‘Moving out.’
“The fact that you can’t even say that aloud is a problem.”
“Yeah. But it’s not my problem. I’m…shit.
I know I’m not the same. My body is never going to be the same, but I’m okay, and Tollin refuses to accept that I’ll be fine on my own.
The last time I said I was looking at apartments, he had a panic attack so bad he had to take a breathing treatment.
” I passed a hand down my face. “I can’t keep living this way to make him happy.
I know he was traumatized. I mean, everyone was… ”
His gaze softened. “Yeah. I can admit now that I was terrified when you told me how bad the injury was.”
He wasn’t the only one shit-scared about my future.
After two months of not being able to move my legs beyond twitching my toes, I’d given up on hope that I would ever get back to anything that resembled my normal.
I was making plans for the rest of my life to be entirely changed when my ankles regained movement.
And then feeling came back—bit by bit. Into my spine first, then into my legs. Then sensation spread to my dick. The first time I got hard from stimulation, I sobbed into my pillow—the feeling in my chest somewhere between relief and fear that I would lose it all again.