Chapter 61 Adela
The doctors call me a fast healer.
They say it like it's a compliment. Like my body doing what it's supposed to do faster than expected is something I earned. The orthopedic surgeon comes in on day four and looks at my scans. He takes one look at me and says, "You're doing remarkably well, Miss Kalkaska.”
I thank him.
And I don’t mention how empty I feel on the inside.
My mother takes me home after six days.
The compound fracture was clean — that's the word they keep using, clean, like something that tears through skin and bone can be clean, but apparently, in fracture terms, clean means it broke in one place and went through in one direction, and the surgical repair was straightforward.
Straightforward.
I add it to the list of words that mean nothing.
The drive to my parents' house takes forty minutes. I sit in the passenger seat with my leg extended and my head against the window. I watch Seattle move past, and I think about the last time I made this drive. Cody's words in my ear. The people around you aren't who you think they are.
He was right.
He was one of them.
When I get home, my father hugs me carefully. He's not a man who cries in front of people, but his eyes are red, and he holds me for longer than he usually does. I let him because I need it.
My mother sets up the downstairs guest room, so I don't have to manage the stairs. She puts the fresh flowers from Maeve and the rest of my friend group on the nightstand. I briefly glance at it, wondering what happened to my wonderful group of friends. They stopped by the hospital, but it’s not the same, and it hasn’t been since I transferred.
My favorite blanket is on the bed along with a stack of books. My mom kisses me on top of my head, and I lean into it. She’s been my rock through this whole thing. I love her so much it hurts.
The first week, all I do is sleep and eat what my mom brings me. I do my physical therapy exercises three times a day. I think getting my body back is the first step toward getting everything else back. Even if I don't know what everything else looks like yet.
I know that I'm working on the body first.
The exercises hurt –– less than I expect by the end of the first week. My surgeon calls it remarkable progress and adjusts my timeline. I write down every instruction and follow each one exactly, and by the end of week two, I'm moving through the house on one crutch instead of two.
One morning, my father watches me navigate the kitchen and says, "You get that from your mother."
My mom says, "She gets it from herself."
I stand at the counter making my own coffee for the first time in two weeks and feel something small and necessary move through me.
Only Maeve contacts me.
I pick up my phone and see nothing from anyone but Maeve. I put it down.
I hate that I think about them constantly.
I think about Beckett's face when I told him to leave. The way he just nodded. No argument, no last attempt, just quiet acceptance that gutted me more than a fight would have.
I think about Cody, and I cry. I know he loves me in his own way, but I also know that I can’t forgive him for what he did to me.
I think about Theo.
I think about Theo more than I think about either of them, which tells me more about myself than any of it.
Why is it always the mysterious ones who don’t give you much?
I think about him standing at the door with his back to me and not turning around.
Just standing there for that one long moment like he was giving me the chance to call him back.
I didn't call him back.
I think about that too.
Week three, I start walking without the crutch inside the house.
My surgeon calls it exceptional. He uses the word exceptional twice in the same appointment. He schedules me for a follow-up two weeks earlier than planned and tells me that whatever I'm doing, I should keep doing it.
I'm doing physical therapy twice a day now instead of once a day.
I'm eating everything my mother puts in front of me, and a lot of it is nutritious meals. For two days in a row, she didn’t feed me meat. She claims her focus is on whole foods and anything I can use for fuel, including special drinks.
I'm sleeping eight hours every night, which is something I haven't done since before I transferred.
My body is healing faster than it should because I am pouring everything I have into it.
Every feeling I don't know what to do with, every thought I can't finish, every question that doesn't have an answer yet — I put it into the exercises, into the sleep, into the whole foods and proteins, and the ice packs.
It's the only thing that makes sense right now.
Week four, I go back.
My mother drives me to UW. She hates that I want to get back.
I tell her on a Tuesday morning that I'm going back on Thursday, and she looks at me for a long moment.
She does three loads of my laundry. She packs food for my refrigerator.
She drives to campus and carries things up to my room while I manage the stairs slowly, and she doesn't comment on how slowly I'm going.
When she leaves, she holds my face in her hands and looks at me.
"You call me," she says.
"I will."
"I’m serious. I will come. You don’t have to do this alone.”
I look at her.
"I’m here. I know more than you think I know," she says quietly. "I was in that waiting room for a long time."
I don't say anything.
She kisses my forehead, and she goes.
My dorm room is exactly as I left it.
Coat on the floor.
I stand in the doorway and look at it. The coat Beckett dropped off my shoulders the afternoon when he kissed me, and I kissed him back. I genuinely thought that what we had was something.
I pick the coat up and hang it on the hook behind the door.
I sit on my bed and look at the room.
I need it be mine again.
I return to my classes, and I go back to work at the café on Monday.
Jordan gives me the easier shifts without being asked.
Counter work, no running. He doesn't ask questions, which is why I like him.
Priya makes me laugh on my third shift back — something stupid about a customer's order — and the laugh comes out of me before I can decide whether I feel like laughing.
It feels strange.
Good strange.
I hold onto it.
I go to the library once.
I'm walking back from class on a Wednesday afternoon when my feet make the decision independently. I find myself in the third-floor political science section, standing in front of our carrel, before I've finished deciding to come here.
I sit down and put my bag on the table.
Then I search the shelves for the book. The Prince.
My heart races when I crack the spine and look at the margins. He returned it to the shelf.
His handwriting. Mine. The whole conversation we had across weeks of afternoons in this chair in this light. I look at it, and I feel it move through me — not cleanly, not simply, not in any way I can name in a single word.
I close the book.
I sit for a moment in the quiet of the third floor and think.
They didn't break me.
Breaking implies pieces. Pieces can be found, gathered, and put back together with enough time and enough patience.
What they did was worse.
They took everything I was made of and unmade it. Down to the foundation. Down to the parts of me I didn't even know were load-bearing until they were gone. And now I'm standing in the wreckage of myself, trying to remember what used to be here, and I can't.
I can't remember who I was before them.
I’ve been deconstructed from the inside out.
The weeks move.
Five weeks out from the accident, I walk without any limp. My surgeon uses the word extraordinary at my appointment and shows me my scans. He points at things, and I nod and schedule my final follow-up.
I don't feel extraordinary.
I feel like a girl who healed her body because it was the one thing she could fix, and everything else is still exactly as broken as the night she sent three men out of a hospital room and listened to the door close three times.
I drive back to campus.
I park.
I go to class.
I come home.
I make dinner.
I read.
I do all of it every day, and I do it well, and nobody looking at me from the outside would know that I am walking around with a hollow chest.
This is just what I am now.
Maybe men destroy, and that's all they do. I have to learn to live in the wreckage and call it my life.
It's officially six weeks out. My ribs no longer hurt when I breathe. My leg is strong. I've been back at work, back in class, back in a life that looks fine from every angle.
I'm at my desk, studying. I read the same page for the tenth time because my brain keeps wandering somewhere I don't want it to.
I give up on the page and put the book down.
I sit in the quiet, thinking. I am so tired of thinking about everything, so I close my eyes. Just one moment to clear my thoughts.
I hear my door open.
My eyes open, and I go still.
I turn my head when I hear silent footsteps enter, uninvited.
Three figures in black fill my doorway.
I stand up so fast my chair falls back and hits the floor. I press myself against the desk, and my heart is violent in my chest.
I open my mouth—
And then I stop.
I look at them.
I know them.
Of course, I know them.
I would know them anywhere. In any room. In any light. In any mask.
I look at all three of them standing in my doorway in the dark, and I feel every complicated layer of it, the anger and the want and the grief and the devastating truth that my body has known something my mind has been arguing with for six weeks.
Nobody moves.
Nobody speaks.
Then the tallest takes one step closer.
Theo.
I don't step back.