Then life did what life does. I left for college. Eli stayed home, finished a computer science degree online, and landed a solid job coding for a software company. We still talked, but not every day. Then not every week. Weekly calls stretched into monthly ones, the way friendships do when nobody means for it to happen.
At twenty-six, I got engaged to a man named Derek.
Eli congratulated me without a flicker of hesitation. He never once brought up the pact. By then it felt like exactly what it was — a sweet, silly piece of childhood, folded up and put away.
Chapter 3 – The Accident
My wedding to Derek was set for early June.
Three weeks before it, I was crossing the street at a marked intersection when a driver blew through a red light doing what the police report later estimated at forty miles an hour. I remember the horn. I remember the impact throwing me sideways. I remember the sky tilting above me like the world had come unhinged.
I woke up in a hospital bed with a shattered pelvis, a fractured leg, and nerve damage that made my left foot feel like it belonged to a stranger.
The doctors were careful with their words. I would probably walk again. They couldn’t promise how well, or how soon, or what “well” would even mean.
Derek visited twice.
The first time, he brought flowers and spent most of the visit staring at the monitors like they might explain something to him. The second time, he asked how long rehab would take.
“Months,” I said. “Maybe longer.”
He went quiet in a way that told me everything before he said a word.
A week later, he called to end things. Not in person. Over the phone, while I was lying in a hospital bed with metal pins holding my pelvis together.
“I’m not strong enough for this, Maren,” he said.
I stared at the ceiling. “Are you saying you can’t marry me because I might need a cane?”
“It’s not just that.”
“Then what is it?”
“The appointments. The care. Everything about our life is going to look different now.”
“So instead of finding out what that looks like, you’re leaving.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and kept saying it, like the word itself was supposed to soften the fact that he was walking away from me while I couldn’t walk at all.
I hung up before he finished.
When I called Eli and told him what happened, he showed up the next morning. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year. For a second, neither of us said anything — he just stood in the doorway of my hospital room, taking in the pins and the bandages and the wheelchair folded in the corner.
Then he pulled a chair up to my bed and took my hand like no time had passed at all.
“You’re not doing this alone,” he said.
I cried harder than I had since the accident.
He didn’t tell me Derek was a coward, even though he clearly thought it. He didn’t tell me I was better off. He didn’t promise I’d recover completely, because he never made promises he couldn’t keep.
He just stayed. And then he kept staying.
For the next seven months, Eli rearranged his entire work schedule around my physical therapy appointments, driving me three times a week. His car already had hand controls and custom seating — he’d modified it himself years earlier — and he spent a weekend adding a second set of supports just so I could transfer in and out safely. He installed grab bars in my bathroom. He lowered the shelves in my kitchen so I could reach things from a wheelchair without asking for help. On the days standing hurt too much, he cooked.
More than anything, he learned the difference between helping me and taking over — and he respected that line even when I didn’t.
“I can do it myself,” I’d snap.
“Then do it yourself,” he’d say, and step back without a trace of resentment.
When I failed anyway, he never looked satisfied to be needed. He’d just ask, quietly, “Do you want help now?”
Some days I hated how patient he was. Some days he hated how impossible I made everything. We fought about pain medication, about missed appointments, about my refusal to ask for help until I was shaking from exhaustion trying to prove I didn’t need it.
One night, after I fell trying to reach the shower alone, he found me on the bathroom floor, half-dressed and furious and crying. He sat down next to me on the tile — didn’t try to lift me, didn’t lecture me, just sat.
“You don’t get extra credit for suffering in private,” he said.
“I don’t want to be a burden.”
