He Married the Farmer Who Taught Him to Live Again novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Five Seconds

The clinic was forty minutes down the highway, in a glass building that smelled of floor polish.

Daniel wiped the armrests of the waiting room chair four times and then sat on his hands.

Johnny held the folder.

It held fourteen months of scans, and one extra sheet in Johnny's handwriting with four little stickers stuck in a row.

"You brought the chart?" Daniel whispered.

"Doctors like charts."

The doctor was a tall woman with grey in her hair and a flat, kind voice.

She read the scans in silence, then Johnny's sheet, and then she looked at the stickers for some time.

"Carrot," she said. "Pea pod. Beet. A, is this a turnip?"

"Thursday," Johnny said. "A turnip."

"And these are doses taken."

"Every one," Daniel said stiffly. "Since Monday."

"And before Monday?"

"Nothing for five months."

She nodded slowly, with no judgment in it.

"Your reflexes are better than your chart says," she said. "You have sensation below the waist. You have hip control and some in the legs. Your injury is incomplete, and I think you knew that."

"I was told I wouldn't walk."

"You were told it by people who looked at a scan. I would like to look at you."

She wheeled him through a door into a long room with two parallel bars of polished steel and a mirror along one wall.

Daniel did not like the mirror.

"Can you hold the bars?" the doctor asked.

"I can hold anything."

"Then let's stand."

Johnny moved to his back without being asked.

"I'll catch you," he said in Daniel's ear. "The whole time. I won't let go."

"I'm not afraid."

"I am," Johnny said. "I just don't want you to see it."

Daniel laughed once, short and surprised.

The doctor locked the brakes on the chair.

Daniel gripped the bars, pushed with his arms, and felt his legs shake under him.

Johnny's arms came around his waist, a firm, warm band.

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