Chapter 4
Elias
I lost the cane on a Tuesday.
Not officially — Saoirse still had me bring it, "just in case," a phrase she deployed with the specific caution of a woman who knew exactly how much I hated being told what I could and couldn't do without it.
But three weeks after the garden, walking from my truck to the clinic doors, I realized halfway across the parking lot that I hadn't touched it once.
"You walked in here without that thing," she said, nodding at the cane still hooked over my arm, unused, more accessory than aid at this point. "How'd that feel?"
"Didn't notice until you said something."
"That's the goal. That's the whole goal, actually — the day you stop noticing is the day it's basically done its job." She made a note, something satisfied in the set of her mouth. "How's the leg otherwise? Any pain today?"
"Some. Manageable."
"Manageable's good. Manageable I can work with." She glanced up from her clipboard, something more careful in her expression now. "How's the rest of you?"
It's become a running joke between us, that question, except it isn't really a joke, not underneath — it's the same door she opens every session, patient as ever, never forcing it, just leaving it ajar in case I decide to walk through.
More and more, lately, I have been.
"Good, actually," I said, and meant it, which still surprised me every time it turned out to be true. "Slept most of the night. Didn't dream."
"That's new."
"That's new." I sat on the mat table, watching her flip through my chart with the same focus she brought to everything, like my recovery was the most interesting puzzle she'd ever been handed. "Feels strange saying that out loud. Like admitting it might jinx it."
"It won't jinx it. Grief isn't superstitious. It doesn't care whether you talk about the good days, it just shows up whenever it's going to show up regardless." She set the chart down. "But for what it's worth, I'm glad. Genuinely."
"Stairs today, huh." I flexed my leg experimentally, testing the give in it. "You building up to something?"
"Maybe. Little bird told me there's a spring ride coming up. Figured your president might appreciate his medic being able to swing a leg over a bike without wincing."
"You talked to Knox?"
"Knox talked to me. Man came in for his own follow-up on an old shoulder injury and spent half the appointment interrogating me about your progress like I was a witness in a trial.
" She said it fondly, no real complaint in it.
"He cares about you. A lot. In case that wasn't already obvious from the banner and the chair and the phone calls. "
"It's obvious." I looked down at my hands again, quieter this time. "Sometimes I don't know what to do with how much this town cares about me. Feels like more than I know how to carry some days."
"You don't have to carry the caring, Elias.
That's the whole point of it. It's supposed to hold you up, not add weight.
" She said it simply, like it was obvious, though it clearly wasn't obvious to me yet, not fully, not in the part of me that still flinched at every kindness like it might come with a bill attached.
"Let people love you without keeping score of what you owe them for it.
That's a skill. Might be the hardest one on this whole rehab plan, honestly, harder than the leg ever was. "
"Yeah." I looked at my hands, at the calluses that were starting to come back in different places than before, garden calluses instead of gear calluses, a whole new geography written across my palms. "It's the garden, I think. Half of it, anyway."
"The other half?"
I looked up at her, and something in my chest did the thing it had been doing more and more lately around her — a kind of tightening that wasn't unpleasant, exactly, just unfamiliar, like a muscle I hadn't used in years remembering how to work.
"You know the other half," I said.
She held my gaze for a beat too long before she looked away, back down to the chart, professional composure sliding back into place like a door easing shut.
"Let's get you moving," she said. "I want to see how that leg handles stairs today."
We didn't talk about the other half. Not that day. But I noticed the way her hand lingered a half second longer than necessary when she adjusted my stance on the stairwell landing, and I let myself believe, just for a moment, that I wasn't the only one carrying something unspoken into that room.
The garden sessions became a regular thing after that first Tuesday — not every appointment, but often enough that I started thinking of Thursdays in terms of soil instead of exercises, of what needed thinning or staking or harvesting instead of what needed stretching.
It was in the garden, three weeks later, hands deep in dirt, that the thing I'd been avoiding finally caught up to me.
"You're quiet today," Saoirse said, not looking up from the tomato cage she was wrestling into submission.
"Thinking."
"About?"
I set down my own trowel, because what I was about to say deserved my full attention, and hers, and I owed her the honesty of actually looking at her while I said it.
"You know I'm getting better," I said. "The leg. The sleep. All of it. You've watched it happen — you're the reason it's happening, most of it."
"That's generous, but you did most of the work."
"I know what I'm about to say is going to sound ungrateful, and I need you to know it isn't. It's the opposite of that. It's the thing underneath the gratitude that I can't figure out how to make peace with."
I took a breath, the words sitting heavy and unfamiliar in my mouth, the way true things always do the first time you actually say them out loud.
"If I get better. If I'm happy — actually happy, not performing it for the club, not managing everyone else's relief that I'm alive — doesn't that mean they didn't matter? Rodriguez. Petrov. Doc. Doesn't it mean I just... moved on? Left them behind for a life they don't get to have?"
Saoirse set down the tomato cage slowly, giving the question the weight it deserved instead of rushing to fill the silence with easy comfort.
"That's the core of it, isn't it," she said. "That's what's actually been sitting under all of this."
"Every step forward feels like a step away from them.
Like the better I get, the further behind I leave the fact that they're gone and I'm not.
And I don't know how to hold both things.
I don't know how to let myself have Thursdays like this without feeling like I'm stealing something that should have been theirs. "
She was quiet for a long moment, dirt on her knees, sunlight catching in her hair, and when she finally spoke, her voice had the particular steadiness of someone choosing every word like it mattered, because it did.
"Healing isn't forgetting," she said. "It's not erasing them, Elias.
It's learning to carry them somewhere other than on your chest, where you can't breathe under the weight of it.
Right now you're not honoring them. You're just suffering alongside their memory and calling it loyalty, and those aren't the same thing, even though grief tries very hard to convince you they are. "
"Then what does honoring them look like? Because from where I'm standing, the only version I've got is not letting myself have anything they don't get to have anymore."
"You don't honor the dead by dying slowly alongside them," she said, quiet but certain, like she'd turned this exact sentence over in her own life more times than I could count.
"You honor them by living a life worth the one they lost. That's it.
That's the whole answer, as much as I have one.
Rodriguez's daughter doesn't need you to suffer in his memory.
She needs the world to have one more good man in it who remembers her father was here, who tells her stories about him when she's old enough to ask, who lives loud enough and long enough that some small piece of what her father died for actually meant something. "
Something in my chest cracked open at that — not painfully, not the way it usually cracked, but like a door finally swinging free after years of being painted shut.
"A life worth the one they lost," I repeated.
"Yes."
"I don't know how to do that yet."
"You don't have to know how yet. You just have to stop actively refusing it while you figure it out."
She reached over, dirt-streaked hand finding mine where it rested on my knee, and the touch was so simple and so steady that it undid something in me faster than any of her words had managed.
"You're allowed to be happy, Elias. You're allowed to laugh at my terrible gardening jokes and sleep through the night and fall for whoever you're going to fall for and build a whole life out here in the sunlight.
None of that erases them. None of that means they didn't matter.
It just means you're doing the hardest, bravest thing there is, which is choosing to keep living after something tried to convince you that you shouldn't get to. "
I didn't have words for a while after that. I just sat there, her hand in mine, dirt under both our nails, the garden going green and gold around us, and let the key finally, fully turn in a lock I'd been carrying since a road in a country I'd never go back to.
"Thank you," I said finally, voice rougher than I meant it to be.
"You're welcome." She squeezed my hand once before letting go, though something in the way she did it told me it cost her something to be the one to pull back first. "Now.
Since we're having breakthroughs, want to actually finish planting these tomatoes, or should we sit here being emotionally profound while the seedlings die of neglect? "
I laughed — really laughed, the kind that came from somewhere lower than my chest, the kind I hadn't done in longer than I wanted to count.
"Grandma would be horrified," I said. "Letting good seedlings wilt over a feelings conversation."
"Grandma sounds like she had her priorities straight."