She opened her mouth and closed it. The argument she wanted to make, that she was careful, that she was good, that she’d done this dozens of times, died in her throat.
Because she had been careful. She was good.
And her body had quit on her anyway.
“I can’t just stop.”
He stared at her. She stared back.
He was right. She knew he was right. Every word he’d said was true and she felt the truth of it in her wrist and her knee and the deep exhaustion in her chest. Her body was running out of credit.
The deal she’d been striking with her own skeleton for three years, the one that said she could keep going, keep climbing, keep pushing past what her joints could sustain. That deal had collapsed on a wall in Chattanooga and nearly killed her.
But it didn’t matter.
She couldn’t stop.
