“What happened to your knee?” she asked.
Rowan stopped.
Celeste looked irritated.
“Arya—”
“Please, Mom.”
Rowan glanced back.
For several seconds, the workshop noises filled the space between them: an impact wrench hammering against a bolt, an air hose dragging across concrete, a radio playing quietly somewhere in the rear bay.
“Workplace accident,” Rowan said.
“Years ago.”
“You limp.”
“When I’m tired.”
“Did they tell you that you wouldn’t walk normally again?”
Rowan’s eyes narrowed, not in anger but recognition.
“They told me what the damage was.
Then they told me what they thought my limits would be.
Some of those limits were right.
Some weren’t.”
Arya looked at her brace.
“How did you know which was which?”
“I didn’t.”
That answer mattered.
Every expensive expert Arya had met spoke in percentages, probabilities, protocols, and carefully controlled optimism.
Rowan was the first person who simply admitted uncertainty.
He wiped his hands again.
“I learned what my knee could do one inch at a time.
I stopped asking it to give me the old life back in one movement.”
Arya swallowed.
The old life.
That was exactly what every rehabilitation session had seemed to demand from her.
Stand like before.
Walk like before.
Balance like before.
Be the girl from before the crash.
And every failure became evidence that the old Arya was gone.
Celeste noticed the change in her daughter’s face.
“We should go,” she said, softer now.
Arya nodded.
But before she moved, she looked at Rowan.
“If I came back, what would you do?”
Celeste turned sharply.
“No.”
Rowan answered before an argument could start.
“Nothing without your doctors knowing.
Nothing that causes pain.
Nothing that pretends I can repair nerves.”
Celeste studied him.
“Then what would you do?”
“I’d watch.”
“Watch what?”
“The part everyone else is too busy measuring to notice.”
Celeste disliked the sentence.
Arya could see that immediately.
But she disliked something else even more: the possibility that there was a question money had never taught them to ask.
They left.
For the entire drive home, neither mother nor daughter mentioned Rowan.
The next morning, Arya asked for his phone number.
