Page 58 of Firefly Embers

She must have instructed me to follow, but my brain was slow on the uptake, swirling with thoughts and emotions. I took a deep breath, steeling my resolve, and walked behind her to my inevitable execution.

WADE

You can ride again.

The words swirled around my mind in a constant loop, taunting me with the hope I’d spent the last two weeks keeping at bay. Had I heard the doctors right? I could ride again.

“Wade.” Dr. Langford’s gentle voice pulled me out of the haze of jumbled thoughts. “Did you hear the doctors?”

She moved her chair to sit closer, somehow using her psychologist’s sixth sense to know that I was likely spiraling.

“Wade. I need you to breathe for me,” she whispered, placing her index and middle fingers over the pulse point on my wrist.

I had no clue how long I’d been sitting here, zoned out, but my lungs felt like they were on fire, and I realized I’d been holding my breath.

Gasping, I pulled in a deep lungful of stagnant conference room air and focused on my breathing exercises again. I hated feeling like I was spiraling out of control with no brakes, and somehow, evening out my breathing into four-second increments calmed me enough to focus on my surroundings.

Dr. Langford kept her fingers on my pulse as I worked to slow my heart rate and calm my breathing, monitoring my ability to self-regulate.

Breathe in for four seconds.

Hold for four seconds.

Out for four seconds.

Hold for four seconds.

I repeated the motions until I could feel the tension that had wound itself through my muscles relax, and the sweat that had broken out across my skin had dried.

“Good. You’re doing fantastic, Wade,” she praised, removing her fingers from my wrist, clearly satisfied with the slowing of my heart rate to a more acceptable rhythm.

It was then that I noticed that the doctors were no longer on the large projector screen across the room. We had called them in virtually to read off the findings of all the tests and scans from the day prior.

Watching a team of world-renowned doctors and surgeons pore over my chart had left me feeling severely undeserving.

My brain kept screaming that I wasn’t worthy of all the attention I was getting and that I should just suck it up and accept that I wasn’t meant to ride anymore. I couldn’t rationalize why these important medical figureheads were so invested in me.

I hadn’t understood 90 percent of the medical jargon they read off the chart in front of them. I didn’t know the meaning of all the results of the scans. But what I did understand were the four words I’d been craving so desperately to hear since the night of the incident.

You can ride again.

“Do you feel calm enough to talk through things a little bit?” Dr. Langford asked, pulling out one of her notebooks and spreading it open on the conference table in front of us. She uncapped a pen and wrote the date at the top. I guess we were having an impromptu therapy session.

I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I nodded and pulled off my Stetson, setting it upside down on the table in front of me. I ran my fingers through my hair, realizing how long it had gotten. As soon as I got out of here, I was going to need a trim.

“So, while I am a healthcare professional, I am not a medical doctor. I don’t understand all the terminology that the team was using, but I did understand quite a bit. Were you able to understand the majority of what they discussed?”

“I can ride again,” I whispered, leaning forward so my elbows rested on my knees as I held my head in my hands, the weight of those words sinking in.

“Yes, Wade. You will be able to ride again. Not right away, but you will be able to get on a horse. How are you feeling about that?”

How was I feeling? I should feel on top of the fucking world.

When the doctor in Firefly Cove told me I couldn’t ride, it ripped everything I had known and worked for my entire life out from under me.

Knowing I could get back out there, even if it took a lifetime, should have filled me with so much happiness I could burst.

But truthfully, I was terrified. What if I got back on a horse and the doctors were wrong? What type of life would I live if I ended up as a paraplegic? How could Ray ever love me if I needed to be pushed around in a wheelchair for the rest of my life and my fucking dick didn’t work?