“They were already staring.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“It helps me,” he said. “Makes me feel less rude.”
I laughed before I meant to.
He took my hands. He moved with me instead of around me. He spun the chair once, then again—slower the first time and faster the second after he saw I wasn’t afraid. He grinned like we were getting away with something.
“For the record,” I said, “this is insane.”
“For the record, you’re smiling.”
When the song ended, he wheeled me back to my table.
I asked, “Why did you do that?”
He shrugged, but there was a hint of nerves in it.
“Because nobody else asked.”
After graduation season, my family moved away for extended rehab, and whatever chance there was of seeing him again disappeared with it.
I spent two years moving between surgeries and rehab. I learned how to transfer without falling. I learned how to walk short distances with braces. Then longer ones without them. I learned how quickly people mistake survival for healing.
I also learned how poorly most buildings serve the people inside them.
College took me longer than everyone else I knew. I studied design because I was angry, and anger turned out to be useful. I worked through school. Took drafting jobs nobody wanted. Fought my way into firms that liked my ideas far more than they liked my limp. Years later, I started my own company because I was tired of asking permission to create spaces people could actually use.
By fifty, I had more money than I ever expected, a respected architecture firm, and a reputation for turning public spaces into places that didn’t quietly exclude people.
Then, three weeks ago, I walked into a café near one of our job sites and spilled hot coffee all over myself.
