He paused but didn’t turn. “Nope. Press the call button when you’re ready.”

Then I was alone—just me, a board, and a chair. Oh, and a catheter bag strapped to my thigh.

It was a problem to solve, I’ll give it that.

I found the control for the bed and maneuvered it into a sitting position. Then I edged my butt closer to the transfer board. My yoga pants had a bit of a bell-bottom, and one cuff got caught in the bedrail, but I worked it out. Perched at the edge, about to shift myself onto the board where there’d be nothing below me but stone-hard hospital floor, I felt frightened for the first time since the crash. In fact, I felt something for the first time since the crash. I paused, out of breath, and wondered why my first feeling couldn’t have been laughter. Or joy.

I edged a little closer, putting all my weight on my palms. The muscles in my trunk were atrophied, yes, but still functioning, which helped—but the dead weight of my legs threw me off balance. I wobbled a little, then hunched down until I was steady again. The chair was maybe twelve inches away, but it might as well have been a football field. I eyed the distance, ooched another inch, lost my balance, hunched down. Then again, and again. After a bit, I noticed that the fabric of my pants had two wet blotches on the thighs, and that’s when I realized that I thought I’d just been concentrating—but instead, I’d been crying. Possibly for some time.

I decided to take a break, halfway across the board.

That’s when Ian walked back in. “God, are you not finished yet? I had a cup of coffee and read the paper.”

If he’d been someone else, it might have been okay. If we’d been friends, if I’d known he was on my side, if we’d built up a rapport—he might have been teasing me in a fun way. As it was, he was just a mean stranger.

I looked up, and when he saw my face—no doubt puffy and slick with tears—I saw the hardness on his falter, just for a second, before he came gruffly over and steadied my shoulders.

“I’ve got you,” he said. “Keep after it.”

With Ian there, it went much faster—and before I knew it, I was trailing along after him as I rolled myself down the hall toward the therapy gym. I tried to think of another time I’d been with another person and felt so alone at the same time. He didn’t speak. He didn’t look at me. You’d think he was out for a stroll all by himself.

He paused at a door to hold it open, which I thought was a nice gesture until he started speaking. “No,” he said, as I rolled past him. “Your technique’s all wrong.”

He sounded irritated, like we’d been over this a thousand times.

“Well,” I said, “I didn’t know there was a technique, and this is my first time to ever do this, so—”

“Nobody’s shown you how to use the chair?”

I shook my head.

“That’s OT 101.”

“I guess we’re still doing prerequisites.” Another sad little attempt at a joke.

He didn’t smile. Instead, he bent forward to look into my eyes and then squeezed my biceps. Then, in a voice that sounded like he was about to impart vital, deeply insightful information, he said, “Arms are not legs.”

I gave him a look, like, Really?

“What I mean is,” he went on, unamused, “they can’t handle the same amount of work as legs. You have to be careful not to strain them with overuse.”

“I don’t see that I have much choice about that.”

“Not in the big picture, no,” he conceded. “But in the details. Hence: chair technique.” He put his hand over mine—it was warmer than mine was, I noticed—and placed it on the rim of the wheel. “Instead of ten little pushes,” he said, “you want to do one strong push and then coast.”

He stretched my hand down low along the back of the wheel and pressed it into a grip around the push rim. Then he brought it up and forward to push off, and I went zooming down the hallway fast enough to scare me, so I grabbed the rim to stop, and got a little friction burn.

Ian jogged up behind me. “You’re going to need some gloves” was all he said.

Next we covered turning, rotating in place, and popping wheelies—though we didn’t actually practice those. “Are wheelies really necessary?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, though he didn’t explain why.

“Why?” I decided to demand.

“Because you need to know how to control your wheels.”

“Why?”

“Because you need to know how to manage all kinds of terrain.”

“Like for when I go off-roading in the Grand Canyon?”

He looked up. “More like for when you encounter steps. Or potholes. Or a curb.” He turned away. “If you want to go anywhere, you need to know how to manage.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” I said.

“You will,” he said as he walked away, all tall and athletic and sturdy. There was something almost mean about how in shape he was, and the way his scrubs draped from his waistband over what any woman with a heartbeat would have to admit was an utterly perfect guy-butt. He was such a supreme physical specimen. I didn’t compare myself to him, exactly, but just being near that kind of robustness made me feel extra weak and shriveled. I looked away.

Anyway, that little Wheelchair 101 moment made us a few minutes late arriving at the therapy gym, and so we signed in a little late, too, which seemed to irritate Ian. “Now we’re late,” he said, noting time on the clock, as if it were my fault.

As if it mattered.

I looked around while he gathered some equipment. If I’d been able to appreciate anything, I would have appreciated the gym. It had all kinds of machines and colors and games. It had a pop-a-shot basketball machine, and a ring toss, and two pinball machines—Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy. It had weights like a gym, and mirrors everywhere, as well as a set of walking bars, a standing frame, and a full-body harness. It had a fine-motor board with locks and latches and screws to work with, and a beanbag-toss game. It had a flight of practice stairs, a minitramp, and a row of recumbent bikes. It even had an entire car, painted a perky aqua, down at one end—I guessed for people to practice getting in and out. Also, up top: quite the speaker system, playing a relentless mix of lite-rock Eagles and Van Morrison tunes.

The old me would have felt tempted to boogie around a little bit, but the new me sat still as a sack of flour.

Ian wrote my name on a big whiteboard that had a slot for every patient on it, with “goals” written out, and smiley faces, and lots of little encouraging sayings. I watched the other trainers while I waited—without exception, an insistently cheerful, optimistic bunch. They laughed loudly, and high-fived, and called their patients things like “champ.” They coaxed. They encouraged. They cheered. They sang along to the music.

One guy with a man-bun, who I would come to know as Rob, was working with an eighty-year-old lady on a walker—and while he wasn’t exactly flirting with her, he was certainly paying her enough attention that she positively bloomed. A female trainer, April, was shooting Nerf hoops with her patient, a forty-something guy in a wheelchair, and high-fiving each swoosh. It was like a big fitness-and-recovery party. All around me, people were moving, and talking, and challenging themselves—and while the patients were more somber, the PTs were nothing short of jovial.

Except for my PT.

I looked over at Ian with his gray frown and his stiff jaw. He was so serious, so sour, so much the opposite of jovial that he practically had a little cartoon scribble of grumpiness above his head.

No wonder he has an open schedule, I thought.

“Late again, Ian,” I heard then. The nasal voice. The same one I’d heard talking to Nina. I looked over to get my first eyeful of Myles, walking toward us. He turned out to have wavy, tight-cropped red hair—clashing boldly with the red sweatshirt he’d zipped over his scrubs—and tight, hard little brown eyes. He looked exactly like his voice.

Ian didn’t respond.

“Hate to have to mark you in the book,” Myles went on, almost glaring at Ian. “But rules are rules.”

Ian held menacingly still, eyes averted.

“Just gotta watch that clock and stay timely.”

Then, I didn’t mean to stand up for Ian, but I did. “He was helping me with wheelchair technique in the hallway,” I said. It just popped out.

Myles shifted his eyes to me. “That’s not PT. That’s OT.”

“But he was correcting my technique.”

“Not his job,” Myles said. “Right, champ? Not your job.”

Ian just worked his jaw.

Myles went on, “Wouldn’t want people thinking you don’t know what your job is.”

I started to argue again, but Ian gave me a look.

Myles was baiting him. “Wouldn’t want people thinking you have no right to be here.”

Ian: Silence. Then more silence.

“Good talk,” Myles said after another minute, clapping Ian on the shoulder.

Then he turned to me and said, “If you need any more advice, I suggest you come to me. I’m just right there in my corner office.”

I saw Ian squeeze his hand into a fist and then stretch it out.