Chapter 6 - CELESTE LOST HER PLACE BESIDE THE BARS
Arya asked Celeste not to attend rehabilitation for two weeks.
Celeste agreed.
Then spent the first three days nearly destroying that agreement by calling Maya, Dr. Levin, the nurse coordinator, and Arya’s driver.
Each time she stopped herself before asking the question she actually wanted answered:
Did she almost fall?
Instead, she began seeing Dr. Hannah Price, a psychologist who specialized in family trauma after catastrophic injury.
Celeste hated the first session.
Hannah did not ask about billionaire pressure, corporate responsibilities, or medical decisions.
She asked about Michael.
Celeste had not spoken about the crash in detail for nearly two years.
Michael died at the scene.
Arya was trapped beside him for twenty-seven minutes before rescuers could remove the door.
Celeste arrived at the hospital after her husband was already dead.
From that day forward, every decision about Arya had been organized around one private command:
Do not lose the second person.
Hannah said, “That kept you functional.”
Celeste nodded.
“It may also be keeping your daughter from discovering what risk she can tolerate.”
That sentence hurt.
Meanwhile, Arya’s rehabilitation became less dramatic and more difficult.
There were no sudden laps around the clinic.
She spent twenty minutes learning to move her pelvis over her left foot without immediately escaping to the right.
She practiced controlled knee flexion while suspended in a harness.
She relearned ankle motion in a pool where fear of falling mattered less.
Some days the leg responded.
Other days it fatigued after minutes.
Once her knee buckled badly enough that the harness caught her.
Arya screamed.
Not from pain.
From terror.
Maya waited until she stopped shaking.
“Do you want to finish?”
Arya looked at the floor.
“What should I do?”
“That’s not the question.”
Arya hated her for saying it.
Then understood.
“I want to stop.”
“Okay.”
They stopped.
The next morning Arya came back.
That choice mattered more than being forced through the previous session would have.
Rowan visited only occasionally. He refused payment from Celeste beyond the original vehicle work.
“I fix cars,” he told her when she offered to put him on consulting retainer.
“You saw something my medical team missed.”
“I saw a shoe.”
That humility irritated Celeste almost as much as it relieved her.
Rowan did agree to help modify Arya’s adapted vehicle as her left-leg function changed.
One afternoon Arya asked why he had recognized her fear.
He pulled up his jeans enough to reveal the long surgical scar across his own knee.
“Because after my accident, I spent eight months moving like the floor was waiting to betray me.”
“Did you get completely better?”
“No.”
Arya looked surprised.
Rowan smiled.
May you like
“Better is not the same word as before.”
That became the first sentence about recovery Arya believed without resenting.
