Wasn’t me, that’s for sure. She had no problem holding her own with me out there. Frustrating woman, calling it as she sees it. To hell with everybody else’s opinion. And changing her mind is as ridiculous as trying to take that goat from the T. rex inJurassic Park. You know you’ll never walk away with more than the bloodied scraps of your pride, and that’safteryou scrape the pieces together.
“She’s not right about me,” he said to the empty room. Sitting deeper in his chair, he rubbed his aching belly. He should fix a sandwich or something to ease the mild nausea that had settled deep in his gut as he watched her thunder past the house. “She’s not right,” he repeated with more force.
That was when he stopped, stunned at the realization of what he’d just done.
He’d controlled his descent from the window to the wheelchair. And he’d done it without help or a single conscious thought. For the first time since the accident, he’d moved without stiff reserve and fearful awareness of every ache, pain... Hell, every threatening twinge.
With his mind tangled up with what had just happened, Ty absently moved toward the doorway, intent on wheeling himself to the kitchen...and came face-to-face with Reagan. Heat flamed across his cheeks at her stunned appearance. His chin came up a notch. “What?”
His sister-in-law looked at him, then his chair and then him again. She raised a hand and held it halfway to her mouth before letting it fall. Her eyes were wide. “You stood. On your own. With so little effort. How? When? And why didn’t you tell anyone you could do this, Ty?” Skepticism vied with amazement in that green-eyed gaze. It unnerved him. Yet no amount of curiosity could dim the inherent compassion shining from her, a beacon of hope in the muted afternoon light.
Tugging at his collar, he slumped a little. He couldn’t explain it, seeing as he couldn’t make sense of it himself. All he knew was that he’d stood when he’d needed to and it hadn’t hurt the way he’d both anticipated and grown accustomed to. He had expected excruciating pain. The kind that stole a man’s breath and rendered him unable to speak, to breathe, to utter a cry for help. But it hadn’t truly hurt.
“Ty?” she pressed.
“I don’t know, okay? I wanted to stand up, so I did.” He could add that he’d been desperate to identify the rider, that he’d needed to know why the cowboy had been riding so hard while Ty sat in his chair, worthless. Standing had been spontaneous, the results both exhilarating and terrifying. “You’ve seen me walk. What’s the big deal?”
“The ‘big deal’ is that none of us thought it was so easy for you. We all believed you had excruciating pain and that’s why you were clinging to the chair so hard.” She sighed and, pulling her ponytail free, rewrapped the hair higher on her head. “What’s going on, Tyson?”
He gripped the chair’s armrests so hard the skin over his knuckles appeared bleached. “It’s not that simple.”
His barked response didn’t faze Reagan. “It should be. If you’re capable of doing more, then do more. Period. You need to get back to physical therapy. You need to stop sitting around doing nothing, letting your muscles atrophy. What you’ve been doing? It’s giving up, Ty.”
He jerked back and hissed at the sharp movement.
The reaction was instinctive but not necessary, because it didn’t hurt. It wasn’t comfortable, sure. But there was a world of difference between discomfort andhurt.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Ignoring her, he wiggled out of his brace. Then, with a tentative touch, he traced the line of his surgical scar down his cervical spine. No acute pain.
“Ty?” Reagan pressed.
He glanced at her, jaw clenched. “I don’t want to stand up.” She started to say something, likely to protest, but he gripped the wheels of his chair and shoved them forward. “Don’t confuse my not wanting to do something with me giving up. Two totally different things. Make sure you get that part straight when you tell Eli.”
With that parting shot, nasty as it was, he rolled through the door and down the hall, forcing himself to consider sandwich condiments in lieu of soul-rattling comments. He’d take mustard over manhandling any day. And wasn’t this embarrassing, his life reduced to sandwich analogies and defending himself to the ghosts of conversations present and past.
Still doesn’t mean either of ’em is right.
He rolled on.
10
KENZIEHADNOidea how far she’d gone before Indie slowed of her own accord. Lathered sweat lay in foamy patches along the mare’s neck. Chest heaving, the animal slowed to a brisk walk, her head bobbing with pleasure at the hard run.
Knotting the reins, Kenzie rested them and then laid them over the horse’s withers before lying down, her spine parallel to the horse’s. A little hissing noise—air between her teeth—instructed the mare to drop to a far more casual pace. Theclop-clop-clopof the horse’s hooves on dry, winter-hardened ground sounded out a rhythm roughly one-fourth as fast as Kenzie’s heart rate.
Somewhere nearby, cows called their calves to their sides, disturbed by the sudden appearance of horse and rider.
Let them chatter. It’s what parents do.
And just like that, everything her dad had said to her raked across Kenzie’s raw nerves again. Her shoulders twitched.
Indie shied away from the movement, the skin along Kenzie’s back shifting hard in protest.
“Easy,” Kenzie said, calm and firm, as she resituated herself in order to keep from ending up in the dirt. The walk to the barn would be a long one.
The horse snorted and tossed her head.
“You and everyone else, always with your opinions.” She rubbed her wind-burned cheeks and stared up the darkening sky. The bone-chillingly cold air was infused with the crisp scent of snow. The sky would let loose before sundown. The cloudcover hung around like the wind’s hired muscle, conveying to everyone that things were going to get ugly. It was only a matter of time.