Liam said nothing.
“Dad.”
“It was complicated.”
Ashley started crying.
Olive looked at her, her voice softening.
“When your grandmother called me today, she told me how much she’d regretted having to miss your graduation. And now your wedding.”
Ashley stopped breathing for a second.
“She thought it was her fault?”
Nobody needed Liam’s answer anymore.
And suddenly I understood something else.Wheelchairs
Mom’s fall had happened three months before Ashley’s graduation.
She’d been at Liam’s house, helping prepare for Ashley’s birthday dinner, when she climbed a small step ladder to hang decorations.
She fell.
The damage to her hip and spine changed everything.
Liam had blamed himself from the beginning.
Afterward, he became obsessed with fixing her.
Private specialists.
Expensive rehabilitation.
New equipment.
He wanted her to sell her house and move somewhere he considered safer.
Mom refused.Sofas & Armchairs
Every refusal seemed to make him angrier.
I’d always thought he was overprotective.
Now I wondered if I’d misunderstood him all along.
Maybe every time Mom’s wheelchair entered a room, Liam didn’t just see her disability.
He saw the one thing he hadn’t been able to fix.
