CHAPTER 7: The First Step

The first time Clara stood, it lasted four seconds. Two therapists held her under the arms. Her knees trembled violently. Sweat gathered at her temples. Lucas watched from the doorway, silent, as if any cheer might break the spell.
On the fifth second, she collapsed back into the chair and laughed once, almost angrily. It was the first laugh that had belonged fully to her in years. "Again," she said. News vans waited outside the center, but Clara refused interviews. She was tired of being a symbol. She wanted to become a person before the world named her something else.
Richard was arrested three days later. The footage showed him leaving his office between lawyers, his face controlled, his wrists hidden under a coat. He told reporters, "Everything I did, I did to protect my daughter." Clara watched the clip once. Then she turned it off. That evening Lucas brought her a final envelope from his mother's storage box. Inside was a photograph from the hospital after the crash: Elena Whitmore alive on a stretcher, eyes open, reaching toward someone outside the frame. On the back, Mara had written one sentence. Elena did not die at the scene. Clara read it twice, then a third time, feeling the room tilt around her. Grief had been the one truth she never questioned. If even that had been staged, then her father had not only stolen her movement. He had stolen the person she had needed most.