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get out the words to demand she tell me where she was going, or why. I couldn’t get out any words. Barely her name. I could sometimes repeat words like a parrot. I knew them, heard my thoughts in my mind, but my mouth wouldn’t translate them.
    I missed Eden. I needed her, and she was gone.  
    I couldn’t make my hand hold onto a tennis ball, much less use a pen or paintbrush. I might never make art again. I might be trapped in this useless body for the rest of my life. I wanted to cry at that thought, but I refused to let myself. I had a routine. I only cried after Cade had gone home. I cried in my bed, alone. I never let Cade see my secret despair. He had to hope, because his hope was all I had getting me from day to day, getting me through each therapy session. Each grueling, agonizing hour of trying to merely grip a tennis ball in my fist. To wiggle my toes and straighten my leg on my own. To repeat single syllables: “Ball. Call. Wall. Fin. Tin. Bin. Much. Such. Touch.” Over and over again until even my tongue was tired and my lips hurt from trying to make them form intelligible sounds.  
    All that pain and effort, sheer exhaustion from the simplest things, when inside, in my mind, I was me, I was Ever Eileen Monroe, the girl I’d always been. The woman I’d become, with Cade. But she was trapped in silence.  
    The one triumph I had, the one thing I’d managed, was to tell both Eden and Caden that I loved them. That was important.  
      I couldn’t ask him what was wrong. I couldn’t talk to him. That was probably the worst part of it all. He was in pain. I knew his Grams and Gramps had both died just before I’d come out of my coma. That had to have been the final blow for him, for my poor sweet man. He’d endured so much. So, so much hell.  
    But it was more than that. I knew it. There was something else eating at him. Something he wasn’t telling me. There was a lot he wasn’t saying. Maybe he was protecting me. Forcing me to keep focused on recovery. But there was a new darkness to him, my Caden. I hated it. More than anything I needed to banish it. To exorcise his demons, to kiss away the lines of worry and pain etched into his features. They hadn’t been there, just yesterday.
    Or, what felt to me like yesterday. It had been nearly two years, I’d been told. Christmas Eve, I was twenty years old. I remembered the screech of tires and weightlessness. Then darkness. I woke up, and I was twenty-two, almost twenty-three, and trapped in a useless, weak, skin-and-bones body. Atrophied muscles. Art gone. Speech gone. The cruelty of it was unbearable.  
    I couldn’t even kiss Cade. He’d lean down, and his lips would touch mine, and I knew he was desperate to feel my lips respond to his, but I couldn’t. I tried. So hard. I practiced when I was alone. I tried to purse my lips. Tried and tried to kiss the air so that when he showed up at seven the next morning, and every morning, I could kiss him back. That was my next goal. Using my hands again, talking, walking, those were all eventual goals. I’d achieve them. There was no other choice.  
    But before any of that, I had to simply kiss Caden.
    Today was a good day. I’d slept through the night without nightmares of never walking again, never talking again, never kissing Cade or making love to him again. Those were the worst dreams, the nights I woke up alone, tears trickling down my face, sobs trapped in my chest. Sometimes I dreamed he got tired of me, sick of waiting for me to get better. In those dreams he’d leave me without a word. Or just not show up. Just vanish like Eden had and I’d be alone in life, and then I’d wake up with screams trapped in my gut, panic eating at me like a bird trapped in a house, banging against windows and walls.  
    Today, though, I woke knowing I’d slept without any of that. I felt hopeful. I practiced pursing my lips, imagined Cade’s lips against mine and pictured myself kissing him. I could do it. I