“Tomorrow at two,” I said. “Take me to see your sister.”Chapter 5: The Weight of Standing
The rehabilitation pavilion at **St. Luke’s Regional Clinic** smelled of isopropyl alcohol, industrial rubber floor mats, and the quiet, stubborn exertion of human beings trying to reassemble their lives from fragments.
I arrived in my standard wheelchair, pushed not by a private chauffeur, but by Tessa. I wore an ordinary gray woolen sweater and trousers, without a tie, without cufflinks, without the armor of the Corvino crest.
Mara Hall sat by the window in the occupational therapy bay.
She had Tessa’s eyes—that same piercing, unblinking gray—but her face was drawn, marked by the fine, silvery lines of surgical scars along her jawline and forehead. A heavy carbon-fiber cane rested against her knee, and her left leg was braced from the hip down.
When she saw the wheelchair approach, her hands tightened around the wooden handle of her cane.
“You brought him here,” Mara said to her sister. Her voice was quiet, lacking the volatile fury Tessa had displayed the night before, but it carried the cold, immense weight of fourteen months of physical torment.
“He asked to come, Mara,” Tessa said softly, stepping back to let the chair come to rest three feet from the examination plinth.
