Chapter 67
Chapter 67:
When Declan woke up in Halcombe General Hospital, the first thing he noticed was that he couldn’t feel his legs.
The second thing he noticed was that Callum was sitting beside the bed — not sleeping, not reading, not looking at his phone, just sitting, with the particular stillness of a man who had been in that chair for a long time and had no intention of leaving it. His suit was different — he’d changed, finally, after five days in the same charcoal fabric — but his face was the same: drawn, unshaven, carrying the exhaustion of a man who had been holding something together and was running out of material.
“Your leg is fine,” Callum said. No preamble. No how-are-you-feeling. The words of a man who understood that the first question a racer asks when he wakes up in a hospital is about his legs, and that the answer should arrive before the question. “They saved it.
Both of them.
But you’ll need rehabilitation. Months of it p>
He paused. The pause contained the thing he didn’t want to say.
“And forget about racing p>
The sentence landed on Declan the way sentences land on people who are lying in hospital beds and can’t move: totally. There was no flinching away, no turning the head, no walking out of the room to process. He was pinned — by the bed, by the casts, by the machinery, by the sentence itself — and the words entered him without resistance.
Forget about racing.
Three words that removed the organizing principle of his entire life.
Declan Thorne without racing was — what? A man. Just a man.
A man with fast reflexes and an engineer’s understanding of torque and a closet full of fireproof suits that he would never wear again. The thing that had made him extraordinary — the willingness to strap himself into a machine and push it past the point where physics said stop — was gone. Not gradually, not through the natural decline of aging or the slow erosion of enthusiasm, but instantly, violently, in a single moment at a single intersection three miles from a wedding he was never going to reach.
He stared at the ceiling. White. Institutional. The ceiling of a room designed for recovering bodies rather than recovering identities.
The rehabilitation took four months.
galnσvє𝓵s.𝓬𝓸m – your update hub
Four months of physical therapy: learning to walk again, which was learning to trust again — trust the legs, trust the ground, trust the body that had betrayed him by failing to dodge a van he hadn’t seen. The therapists were patient. The exercises were repetitive. The progress was measured in millimeters — millimeters of range, millimeters of strength, millimeters of the distance between who Declan had been and who he was becoming.
He walked.
Eventually. Without a limp, without assistance, with the mechanical competence of a body that had been repaired. The physical therapist discharged him with the cautious optimism of a professional who understood that the body was fixed but couldn’t speak for the rest.
On the day he was cleared, Declan went to a car.
It was a normal car. Not a race car — a sedan, automatic transmission, the kind of vehicle that insurance companies loved and driving enthusiasts ignored. He opened the door. Sat in the driver’s seat. Put his hands on the wheel.
The sweat began before the key was in the ignition.
It started at his palms — a sudden, total wetness that coated the steering wheel and made his fingers slip. Then his forehead. Then his back, soaking through his shirt in a spreading stain that his body was producing without his consent. His heart rate, which had been resting at a healthy sixty-two beats per minute, climbed to one hundred. Then one hundred and twenty. Then one hundred and forty — the heart rate of a man running a sprint, except Declan was sitting in a parked car in a hospital garage and the only thing running was his autonomic nervous system, which had decided, without consulting his will or his pride or his identity, that cars were no longer safe.
The feeling was not fear.
Fear was a word Declan understood — he’d been afraid before, on racetracks, in crashes, in the moments between impact and consciousness.
Fear was manageable.
Fear was a wave you could ride.
This was different. This was the body’s absolute, non-negotiable refusal to cooperate. The feeling of being close to death — the crushed dashboard, the trapped legs, the blood on his cheek, the phone that wouldn’t connect — replayed not in his mind but in his nervous system, in his muscles, in the ancient, reptilian circuits that had decided: never again. The shadow of the intersection fell across the interior of the sedan, across the dashboard, across his hands, across the part of his identity that had been built on the belief that he was a man who was not afraid of machines.