Never the Way We Were
The year I lost my sight at five, I found Stellan Hale half-frozen in the snow.
I told my mother I wanted a companion to guide me and begged her to take him in. Then I leaned close to his ear and whispered a promise.
"I don't need you to be my guide dog. Just stay alive. Go wherever you want to go."
Still, Stellan stayed. After Mom remarried, he became the only person I had left. He watched over me as I grew up, serving as my eyes and my cane year after year. He even gave up his extraordinary talent for painting to study medicine, all for the sake of my sight.
Even after he became one of the most brilliant ophthalmologists in the country, I still could not see.
On my 25th birthday, someone he had once been close to won a prestigious art prize. He shut himself inside the study, and I could hear pages rustling behind the door.
He told me, his voice carefully even, that he was writing my birthday wishes.
I smiled and moved toward him, wanting to kiss his cheek, when words suddenly scrolled across the darkness behind my eyes.
"Wake up, you blind little fool. He's tearing every one of his paintings to shreds. On the back of each one, he even wrote 'Go to hell, Elara Langley.'
"Stop walking. There's a wire on the floor ahead of you. One more step and you're dead."
I froze. Then I smiled again and kept walking.
"Stel, Stel, every wish you made for me is going to come true."