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know, he’s still not awake, though.”
    â€œThey’re saying he may never walk again.”
    Lynda snapped a look back to Sally. Slowly, she sat up. “What? Where did you hear that?”
    â€œOn the news,” Sally said. “Last night they did a report about the crash. Apparently he has a spinal cord injury, and he lost one eye.”
    Lynda brought her hands up to cover her face and sank back into her pillow. “Abby said his face was the least of his problems, but I didn’t know. . . .”
    â€œAll things considered, Lynda, he’s lucky to be alive.”
    Lynda tried to take in a deep, cleansing breath and slid her hands down her face. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I guess we have to look at it that way. I just don’t understand.”
    â€œUnderstand what?”
    â€œWhy I wasn’t hurt worse. My legs are fine. I only broke a couple of ribs and lost my spleen. He almost died, and it wasn’t even his plane!”
    â€œLynda, stop beating yourself up. If you’d been hurt worse, do you think it would have taken away from his injuries?”
    Sally didn’t understand, Lynda thought dismally. Nobody could understand.
    Sally seemed at a loss for anything else that would comfort her, so she opened Lynda’s bag. “Well, anyway, I got you everything you wanted from home. If you need me to go back, I’ll be happy to.”
    â€œNo,” she said, without even checking the bag’s contents, “this should be enough. Thanks, Sally.”
    Sally slapped her thighs. “No problem. I’ll get in touch with Paige as soon as I can. And you call if you need me. Everything will be back to normal in no time, okay?”
    â€œYeah,” Lynda whispered, but as she watched Sally leave the room, she wasn’t sure that normal would ever be good enough again.
    J ake wished he’d stayed asleep.
    And frankly, he didn’t know why he hadn’t. What was the use in waking up, just so he could listen to the doctor tell him again of the gash that had maimed his face and destroyed one eye? And that was just the beginning.
    â€œTell me about my back and my legs, Doctor. Tell me why I can’t move.”
    Dr. Randall—a man in his mid-fifties who had more lines on his face than a street map of Tampa—leaned wearily over Jake’s bed rail and seemed to consider his words carefully. This was going to be a tough one, Jake thought. When a doctor grew that thoughtful and hesitant about giving a prognosis, the most obvious question was, “How soon should I buy my burial plot?” But Jake feared the news might even be worse than death.
    â€œYou have lower lumbar compression, Jake, due to the impact of the crash, and that’s led to a condition called spinal shock,” the doctor said carefully. “It’s caused paralysis in your legs. You can count yourself fortunate, though. If the compression had been higher, you wouldn’t have use of your arms, either.”
    â€œSo I’m supposed to breathe a sigh of relief because I’m a paraplegic and not a quadriplegic?”
    The doctor accepted his cynicism with patience. “Let me finish, Jake. The paralysis could be temporary. You have a gash on your back, too, and a lot of swollen tissue. The steroids we’re giving you are to keep the swelling down so it won’t cause any more nerve damage. And until we get that swelling down, there’s no way to tell how much of the damage is permanent.”
    Jake fought the furious tears burning his eyes. “Bottom line, Doc. Am I ever gonna walk again or not?”
    Dr. Randall rubbed his eyes, leaving them red. “We can’t know that for several days. Maybe longer.”
    â€œBut what do you think ?”
    The truth seemed to take more out of the doctor than he had to give. “I don’t know, Jake. We’ve been successful with a drug that we think regenerates the nerve cells, and