What degree? What license gives you the right to remove my daughter's medical equipment and strap her into this pile of bicycle parts?"
"Mrs. Larkin," Boon began.
"I will sue you," she said, rising to her feet, her fury somehow straightening her spine. "Practicing medicine without a license, endangering a disabled person.
I have enough lawyers to shut this garage down within a week and make certain you never so much as fix a bicycle in the state of Arizona again."
"Mom," Piper cried out. "Look at me.
I just walked six steps without pain. Six steps.
Do you know when the last time I walked without pain was? It was before the day you let the driver take me to my race."
The words tore the room apart. Genevieve stood frozen as if she'd been shot.
11 years and mother and daughter had never spoken of that day. And now it lay there in the middle of an oil-stained garage floor, stripped bare in front of a stranger.
The mother's face went white. Then, as she had every time in her life she'd been wounded, Genevieve Larkin did the thing she did best.
She froze over, and she gave orders. "Get in the car.
Now."
Genevieve picked up the Vitamotion braces, helped her daughter up with hands that were still shaking, and guided her toward the door. At the threshold, Piper looked back.
Her eyes met Boon's, and in that one second he saw in them an apology, a thank you, and something that looked like goodbye. The black SUV pulled away.
This time, Boon didn't watch it go. He sat down on the shop floor, right where Piper had fallen, and buried his head in his hands.
On the bench, the braces he had spent 10 days building lay still beneath the light, the straps hanging open like an outstretched hand no one would take. 3 days later, a thick envelope arrived at the shop.
Inside was a letter from the law firm representing the Larkin family, a demand to cease all contact with Miss Piper Larkin along with a warning that legal charges were under serious consideration. Clipped to the file was a technical assessment provided by Vitamotion Labs signed by Dr.
Nathaniel Crane, concluding that the homemade device of unknown origin posed unacceptable risks to a patient with spinal cord injury.
Crane had struck fast and clean. To him, this was never merely about crushing some grease monkey.
If that homemade brace worked, if even one person could prove that his showcase design had tormented a girl for years, then it wouldn't just be the Larkin contract that collapsed. The name Nathaniel Crane itself would collapse.
And deeper still, in a place even he didn't dare look, those complaint letters from that girl, the ones he had personally stamped "no clinical basis," year after year after year would be dragged into the light. People wouldn't ask, "Where was the design flawed?"
People would ask, "How long did you know?" Meanwhile, at Halloway's Garage, the days that followed were the darkest since Mabel's passing.
Boon still opened the shop, still fixed cars, but anyone who knew him could see something had gone out. In the evenings he sat for long stretches in front of the braces on the workbench.
Reason told him, "Take them apart. Sell off the aluminum.