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“Well, that was easy money. You lost your husband three months ago, and you’ve had to go through all this with Finn alone. I’m shocked that you’re not bawling your eyes out twenty-four-seven.”
She swallows hard and looks at me with watery eyes. “You’re such a strange man. One minute I’m sure you think I’m mad, and the next you say something like that.”
I watch her as she gathers her composure. She takes several deep, shaky breaths, looking across the pond at the statue of the woman with the blindfold and the outstretched arms. “That’s how I feel,” she whispers. “Groping blindly in the dark.”
“Well, hopefully we can provide you with a flashlight to help you see better.”
She rubs her nose. “What’s the next step?”
“I’d like to meet Finn. We should arrange for you to bring him in. I’ll go over everything we’ve discussed, and then I’ll show him around Kia Kaha and introduce him to THOR.”
“I’d appreciate that. It has surprised me how often medical professionals talk to me and seem to forget he’s in the room.”
“He’s the most important person in the whole equation. I want him to understand what we’re going to ask him to do, and make sure he’s on board with it.”
“Okay.”
“I’d like him to meet the rest of our team, especially Tyson Palmer eventually. He’s a good friend of mine, and he’s the reason we created MAX—the adult version of THOR. He suffered a spinal column injury when he was twenty-two, which put him in a wheelchair. His injury was more severe than Finn’s, and it’s taken him a lot longer to regain his mobility. But he’s getting married tomorrow, and he’s going to surprise his fiancée by standing to say his vows.”
“Oh,” she murmurs, “that’s wonderful.”
“Yeah, we think so. It’s taken him five years of hard work, but he never gave up.”
“Finn will work hard,” she says. “I know he will. It was just… after what the doctor said, he was very down, and it was hard to get him to do his physio. I’m guessing he didn’t want to give Finn false hope, but I don’t think he should have told him that.”
“He absolutely should not have said that. But anyway, why don’t we get back to the office, and we’ll make an appointment for Finn to come in?”
She nods, and we get to our feet and start walking back.
She holds out my pocket square to me. “Keep it,” I tell her. “I have plenty of others.”
“Um, okay, thank you.” She slides it into her pocket.
“Is Finn back at school?”
“Yes, he started this week. He’s in his last year at the primary school where I work. They have a Learning Enrichment Center, and they’ve allocated someone to stay with him during the day for a while, to take him to each lesson, and to the bathroom if he needs it.” She bends to pick up a scarlet leaf. “He hates being treated as if he’s disabled,” she admits. “But I didn’t want him to miss too much schooling.”
“So we’ll get him in after school. Three-thirty until four-thirty?”
“You don’t work weekends?”
“Juliette doesn’t.”
“Oh, of course.”
“Once Finn is comfortable with the physio program, another of our team can be there on Saturdays if you’d like to swap one of the days.”
“It’s tough for me to leave school at three-thirty,” she admits, “that’s all.”
“You don’t have to stay with him. You can drop him off and then go back to school for an hour. Or I can come and pick him up if you want.”
Her eyes widen. “Seriously?”
“He’ll be fine with us, once he gets to know us. There’s not a lot you can do anyway—you’d just be sitting there, watching. You’re welcome to, of course, but it’s important that you carry on with your own life.”
She lowers her gaze to the ground, and we walk quietly for a while.
“I really appreciate this,” she says eventually. “Thank you, for choosing Finn, and for being so understanding.”
