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Nate keeps his hands gripped around my left arm as one of the men holds down my other, the second grasping the leg that isn’t covered in plaster—not that I can feel what I’m assuming is a firm grip or even move them for them to be a problem—before a portly woman with a dark-brown pixie cut moves closer.
“I need you to calm down, you’ll cause more—”
“I can’t feel my legs!” I scream so loud my throat burns like I have a thousand fire ants crawling inside it.
Her eyes widen before she schools her features and shouts, “We need to sedate her!”
“No! Please,” I beg as she’s handed a large needle. “I just want to be able to feel my legs.”
“It’s okay, Lia, I’m right here,” Nate says softly, but I can hear the tremble in his voice as he tries to get closer to me.
“Sir, you shouldn’t be in here. You need to leave,” the nurse holding the needle says sternly.
I shake my head back and forth, my hair flying around my face as I start to panic. “He can’t leave!” I shout. “I need him here,” my voice croaks as I manage to whisper, “I need him here.”
I stare at Nate, begging him with my eyes to help fix me, to find all the broken pieces and put me back together again, but the sorrow shining back at me tells me he can’t. He can’t put me back together again—no one can.
He moves in closer, not breaking eye contact with me. “It’s okay, everything’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.”
My muscles start to wane, tiredness overtaking me at an alarming rate before I lift my hand, cupping his cheek and feeling the rough scruff on his face against my palm. “Fix me… please.”
I watch helplessly as the nurse injects the liquid into Amelia’s drip, my gaze flicking between the needle and Amelia’s eyes as they start to shut. I refuse to take my focus off her until she’s fully under and they’ve started to bandage up her side again.
As soon as her eyelids flutter closed, a voice sounds from behind me. “What the hell is going on?”
I spin around, my gaze connecting with Carl’s as the nurse says, “The doctor is on his way and we’ll know more then, but your daughter was becoming increasingly agitated and we didn’t want her to do more damage than good. We had to sedate her.”
“She said she couldn’t feel her legs, I didn’t know what to do,” I mumble when she’s finished speaking, still in a daze.
His eyes flash as he takes a step toward us. “She what?”
I lower myself onto a chair beside Amelia. “She woke up and started hitting her legs saying they weren’t working.”
A panicked look crosses his features and we both turn as Doctor Bale walks in, glancing around the room. The nurse rushes over to him and everyone else in the room steps back from Amelia.
The nurse whispers to the doctor and he turns toward us, looking at Carl first and giving him a small smile. “I’m afraid there’s nothing much I can tell you right now that wouldn’t be speculation, but I’m going to order an MRI scan so we can see what’s really happening.”
I turn and grasp Amelia’s hand as they start to make her machines portable, praying for the first time in my life that everything will be okay.
I feel a hand on my shoulder and Carl nods at me, making me let go of her hand and watch as they wheel her out of the room.
“As soon as she’s awake we’ll go through the results.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Carl says and Doctor Bale nods before he walks out of the room.
I stand up and walk out behind him, feeling like I can’t breathe. My chest constricts and I manage to make it out of the ICU and into the hallway before my legs start to feel like Jell-O and I slide down the wall, head between my knees.
I take a few deep breaths as I try to tell myself that this isn’t happening, that mere hours ago I didn’t see the woman I love being pushed over a railing thirty feet off the ground. As I lift my head, seeing I’m still in the hospital, the reality of it hits me full force and I can’t stop the tears from making tracks down my cheeks like a fast-flowing river.
“Nate?”
I don’t take my eyes away from a scuff on the wall opposite me but I know it’s Tris. “She…” I can’t get the words out to tell him that she can’t feel her legs.
“Nate, you need to talk to me, she’s my family, too.”
I swallow the building lump in my throat, having to try a couple of times to get some control over it before I croak out, “It’s her legs… she has no feeling in them.”
I pull my gaze away from the scuff to see Tris with his head in his hands. “She’s paralyzed?”
