I met Colton in high school. He was my very first love — not fireworks exactly, not some grand gesture. Simply this quiet, steady feeling instead. Like coming home. We were seniors, thoroughly in love, and genuinely convinced we were untouchable together. We also believed the future stretched out ahead of us full of wonderful opportunities, having absolutely no real idea yet how difficult life could actually become.
Then, a week before Christmas, everything turned chaotic all at once.
He’d been driving to his grandparents’ house on a snowy night. Or at least, that’s precisely what I believed for fifteen straight years.
The call came through while I sat on my bedroom floor, wrapping presents. His mother was screaming into the phone, and I only caught a scattered few words. Accident. Truck. He can’t feel his legs.
The hospital sat harsh with fluorescent lights and stale, recycled air. He lay there in a bed lined with rails and wires, a neck brace fitted tight, machines beeping steadily nearby. His eyes stayed open, at least. “I’m here,” I told him, grabbing his hand tight. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The doctor pulled his parents and me aside. “Spinal cord injury,” he said plainly. “Paralysis from the waist down. We don’t expect any real recovery.” His mother sobbed. His father simply stared down at the floor.
I went home entirely numb.
My own parents were waiting at our kitchen table, sitting there like they were about to negotiate some kind of formal plea deal. “Sit,” my mother said. I sat.
“He was in an accident,” I told them. “He can’t walk anymore. I’m going to be at that hospital as much as—”
“This isn’t what you need right now,” she cut in sharply.
I blinked. “What?”
“You’re seventeen,” she said. “You have a real future ahead of you. Law school. An actual career. You cannot tie yourself down to… this.”
“To what?” I snapped. “To my own boyfriend, who just got paralyzed?”
My father leaned forward across the table. “You’re young. You could find someone healthy instead. Successful. Don’t go ruining your entire life over this.”
I actually laughed, because I genuinely believed they had to be joking. “I love him,” I said. “I loved him well before the accident ever happened. I’m not walking away simply because his legs no longer work properly.”
My mother’s eyes went completely flat. “Love doesn’t pay any bills. Love won’t lift him into a wheelchair for you. You have absolutely no idea what you’d actually be signing up for.”
“I know enough,” I said. “I know he’d do exactly the same thing for me.”
She folded her hands neatly together. “Then this becomes your own choice entirely. If you stay with him, you do it without our support. Financial, or otherwise.”
I stared at her. “You’d genuinely cut off your only child, simply for refusing to dump her injured boyfriend?”
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