Chapter 8 - Landon Stopped Testing His Legs for Her
The restaurant video spread privately among staff before Landon could stop it.
Not the footage of Camille altering his drink.
The other part.
Landon standing.
Everyone wanted to talk about the miracle.
He hated the word.
There was no miracle.
He still needed the wheelchair.
His legs still weakened quickly.
His balance remained unreliable.
Standing for forty seconds did not erase a spinal injury.
The exaggerated reactions made him understand something important:
he did not want recovery to become another performance.
Camille had already turned his body into one.
Weak enough to need her.
Strong enough to admire.
Never simply his.
So Landon made a rule.
No more secret tests designed to prove Camille wrong.
He would rehabilitate according to medicine, not revenge.
Nora liked that.
His physician liked it more.
The doctor repeated testing after the sedating substance was out of Landon’s system consistently.
The results showed what months of irregular sessions had obscured:
His motor recovery was real.
Limited.
Slow.
But real.
He had lost valuable rehabilitation consistency, but not necessarily his opportunity to improve.
That distinction mattered enormously.
Landon asked:
“Would I be walking now if this hadn’t happened?”
The physician refused the fantasy.
“No one can answer that.”
Good doctor.
“What can you answer?”
“That your worst regressions were not all neurological.”
That was enough.
For the first time, Landon stopped interpreting every failed stand as evidence his body had betrayed him.
Some failures were simply bad days.
Some had been externally worsened.
Some were part of recovery.
He began learning the differences.
May you like
And as his certainty about his own body returned, Camille’s power over him diminished faster than his wheelchair ever could.
---
