Chapter 6 Brad
The physical therapy room at the team facility smelled like industrial disinfectant and broken dreams. I pushed through my third set of leg lifts, my knee screaming protests while Jake, the sadistic PT, counted reps with unseemly enthusiasm.
"Eight, nine, come on Wilder, my grandmother moves faster than this!"
"Your grandmother didn't have a torn MCL," I grunted, sweat dripping onto the mat.
"Fifteen! Good set. How's the pain level?"
"Manageable." It was always manageable. Pain was just information, and I'd learned to file it away with all the other information I constantly processed—Finn's breathing rates, his medication schedule, the weather forecasts that had become my obsession since Sarah's accident.
Speaking of weather...
Every screen in the facility showed the same thing: a massive winter storm system bearing down on Colorado.
The meteorologists were using their serious voices, the ones reserved for potentially historic events.
"Unprecedented snowfall." "Potentially catastrophic blizzard conditions. " "Life-threatening accumulations."
"Looks nasty," Jake commented, following my gaze. "They're saying three to four feet of snow in the valley, more in the mountains. White-out conditions, wind gusts up to sixty miles per hour."
Three to four feet of snow. Power outages. Roads buried and impassable. No way to get to the hospital if—
"I need to go," I said, already pulling on my shirt.
"Brad, you've got twenty more minutes—"
"Family emergency."
It wasn't a lie. Every storm was a potential emergency when you had a child with severe asthma. Cold air, pressure changes, stress—all triggers. I'd learned to prepare for disasters because the one time I hadn't, Sarah hadn't come home.
I picked Finn up from school early, ignoring the secretary's knowing look. Everyone in Wrightwood knew Brad Wilder was "overprotective" since his wife's death. They whispered about it at school functions, made sympathetic noises while judging my helicopter parenting.
"Dad, it's only 1:30," Finn protested as I buckled him into his booster seat. "We were about to finger paint! Mason was going to eat the paint again and Mrs. Rachel was going to freak out and everything!"
"Storm's coming, buddy. Need to get supplies."
"The big one they're talking about on the news?" His eyes lit up with excitement that made my chest tight. He didn't remember the storm that took Sarah, thank God. To him, blizzards meant snow days and hot chocolate.
"Yeah, the big one."
The grocery store was controlled chaos. Half of Wrightwood had the same idea, filling carts with bread, milk, and batteries like the apocalypse was coming.
My cart looked like a doomsday prepper's dream—three types of batteries, enough medication to run a small pharmacy, water, non- perishable food, emergency heating sources, battery-powered air purifier, manual can opener, first aid supplies that could stock an ER.
"Dad, why do we need twelve flashlights?" Finn asked, adding a box of cookies to the cart when he thought I wasn't looking.
"Redundancy, bud. One is none, two is one."
"That makes no sense."
"It means always have backups for your backups."
He considered this. "Is that why you put seventeen inhalers in the cart?"
"Twenty-three, actually. And yes."
Finn picked up one of the inhalers, examining it. "You know, Miss Serena taught me a breathing technique at school for when I can't find my inhaler right away. She showed me and Matthew—he has asthma too—how to stay calm and breathe properly."
"Yeah? That's smart."
"Yeah, she's really cool. She helped Dameon with his reading stuff, and she got special fidget tools for Emily so she can focus better.
" Finn's face lit up as he talked. "And yesterday, when I had that asthma attack during PE, she knew exactly what to do.
She stayed with me the whole time, even taught the other kids about asthma so they wouldn't be scared. "
"She's good at her job."
"She is! She makes everyone feel like they belong, you know? She started this thing where—" Finn stopped mid-sentence.
"Miss Serena!" Finn's voice went up three octaves as he spotted her near the soup aisle, holding a basket with modest supplies—a flashlight, some canned soup, bread. She looked slightly overwhelmed by the crowd's intensity.
She turned at Finn's voice, her face brightening with a smile that did things to my chest I didn't want to examine. She wore jeans and a sweater that brought out the brown in her eyes, her hair pulled back in a messy bun that made her look younger, softer.
"Hi, guys," she said, eyeing my cart with amusement. "Planning to bunker down for the winter?"
"Dad's being paranoid," Finn announced cheerfully. "But paranoid with cookies, so it's okay."
"I saw those cookies you snuck in," I said, ruffling his hair. "And it's not paranoid, it's prepared."
"The checkout line's insane," Serena said, gesturing to the queues that stretched into the aisles. "I'll probably just eat peanut butter straight from the jar and call it dinner."
"Come have hot chocolate with us!" Finn grabbed her sleeve. "The store has a café and Dad always lets me get whipped cream when we're waiting for lines to go down. Please?"
She glanced at me, questioning. I nodded, trying to ignore how right it felt to include her in our routine.
The café was crowded but we found a small table. Finn immediately launched into a detailed explanation of his storm preparation responsibilities—filling water bottles, checking flashlight batteries, making sure his breathing medications were all accounted for and accessible.
"First," he counted on chocolate-covered fingers, "water bottles filled to HERE—" he indicated a precise level with his pinkie, "—not HERE because they'll explode when frozen. Second, flashlights in every room including bathrooms because what if you're pooping when the power dies? Third—"
"Breathe, buddy," I interrupted.
"Breathing is step four. After checking all medications are accessible." He turned to Serena with deadly seriousness. "Do you have backup medications?"
"I don't take any medications."
Finn's eyes went wide with the kind of awe usually reserved for superheroes. "None? Like, zero medications?"
"Zero."
"Weird flex but okay," he muttered, which made Serena snort-laugh into her coffee.
"Where did you even learn that phrase?" I demanded.
"Friends."
"You're seven."
"Seven and three quarters." He stirred his hot chocolate counterclockwise exactly six times. "Miss Serena, do you know about real winter? Dad googled San Antonio and said you probably think fifty degrees is Arctic."
"Finn—"
"He's right," Serena laughed. "The biggest storm I dealt with in San Antonio was when the air conditioning broke in August. This is all new territory."
"You need supplies," I heard myself saying. "Your cabin's older, probably not as insulated. Do you have a backup heat source? Emergency water? Battery radio?"
"I have..." she paused, thinking. "A flashlight and the soup you just saw me buy."
"That's not enough!" Finn looked genuinely distressed. "Dad, she needs help!"
And somehow, that's how I ended up spending my afternoon winterizing Serena's cabin. Finn appointed himself assistant supervisor, creating increasingly elaborate scenarios about what could go wrong in a storm while Serena and I worked.
"What if bears try to get in because they smell food?" he asked, watching me seal a drafty window.
"Bears hibernate in winter, buddy," I said, spreading caulk along the frame.
"What if they wake up hungry?"
"Then Miss Serena throws the soup at them and runs next door," Serena suggested, making Finn giggle.
We worked well together, falling into an easy rhythm. She handed me tools and occasionally touched my shoulder when she moved past—casual contact that shouldn't have made my skin hum.
"You're good at this," she said as I installed weather stripping on her door.
"I've had practice. Our house is basically a fortress at this point." I straightened, catching her watching me with an expression I couldn't read. "What?"
"Nothing. Just... you're not what I expected when I first saw you at the rink."
"What did you expect?"
"Typical hockey player. All ego and swagger." She smiled. "Instead, you're all careful preparation and dad jokes."
"My dad jokes are excellent."
"Your dad jokes are terrible," Finn called from where he was organizing emergency supplies with military precision. "Miss Serena's just being nice."
"Traitor," I muttered, but I was smiling.
As we worked, I found myself telling her things I hadn't told anyone. How I'd installed medical-grade air filtration after Finn's first major attack. How I'd learned to read weather patterns obsessively after Sarah's accident. How I'd turned fear into action because action felt like control.
"Control's an illusion though," I said, tightening the last screw on a storm shutter. "Things happen anyway."
"But preparation helps you feel ready for them," she said softly. "That's not nothing."
The first snowflakes started falling as we finished, fat and lazy, nothing like the violence the forecast promised.
"It's pretty," Serena said, standing on her porch watching the snow begin to dust the trees.
"It's starting," I corrected, weather anxiety already cycling through worst-case scenarios. "We should head back. Finn needs his preventive medications before the pressure really drops."
"Of course." She turned to Finn. "Thank you for helping today. I feel much safer now."
"You can come to our house if you get scared," Finn offered. "We have a guest room and Dad makes good hot chocolate—not as good as the café but still good."
"That's kind of you."
I wanted to echo the invitation, to insist she shouldn't weather her first mountain blizzard alone. But that felt too intimate, too much like admitting I wanted her in our space, in our life.
"The offer stands," I said instead, aiming for casual. "If you need anything."
"Sure." She smiled.
Walking home with Finn against the gathering wind, I let myself imagine for just a moment what it would be like if this was normal. If Serena was ours to protect, not just a neighbor we'd run into at the store. If the storm brought her to our door and gave me an excuse to keep her safe.
"Dad?" Finn's voice pulled me from dangerous thoughts. "Can we invite Miss Serena for dinner sometime?"
"I'm sure she's busy—"
"But she lives all alone next door," Finn reasoned, kicking at a chunk of ice. "And you always make too much spaghetti. And she's really nice and doesn't treat me like I'm weird because of my breathing."
I looked down at my son, his cheeks pink from cold, hope shining in his eyes. "You really like her, don't you?"
"Don't you?" He gave me that too-knowing look that reminded me so much of Sarah. "You smile different when she's around. Like how you smile when you look at Mom's pictures."
The observation hit me square in the chest. "Finn—"
"We should invite her for dinner tonight," he continued, undeterred. "Before the storm gets bad. That's what neighbors do, right? Help each other?"
As we walked up to our house, Finn still making his case about storm safety and neighborly duty, I thought about Serena's laugh as we worked to winterize her cabin, the way she'd ruffled Finn's hair after he'd shown her how to properly seal a window, how natural it had felt working side by side even though we'd only offered to help out of basic neighborly concern.
There was a storm coming—the weather forecast promised that. But there was another storm building, one made of brown eyes and easy laughter, of someone who understood Finn's needs without making them overwhelming, who made our fortress feel less like a prison and more like a home.
That storm scared me more than any blizzard ever could.