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“I didn’t think my arm would ever be right again,” he breathed.
“Why not?” Edie asked, biting back a smile.
He had a constellation of dark freckles across one cheek, which he scratched as if they were bug bites. “I guess ’cause it made such a... cr-r-runch when I came down on it. Like a stick breaking. My arm just bent back, way back, like it could never straighten out again.”
Edie managed to conceal her wince of pain, knowing it was part of the healing process, this needing to relate the gory details of a frightening episode to another person in a post-traumatic-stress way of reliving it in order to be purged of it.
Which, once begun, now seemed to pour out of Sam. “I got up, and my hand flopped down a little in this really weird way. That’s when Mrs. Baxter came around the side of the staircase. She turned white as a sheet when she saw my hand. I thought, uh-oh, and I started to get scared. I tried to move my fingers but it hurt too much.”
She forestalled any further confession from Sam by asking, “Who’s Mrs. Baxter?”
“She’s my sitter. Kind of an older lady—”
“Whose heart probably isn’t used to seeing such daring.” She set her hand on the boy’s knee to emphasize her point, and for the first time Sam permitted the caress. “You must take more care, Sam. The next time you think about trying something kind of chancy like that, would you run it by your dad or Mrs. Baxter first? Would you do that, for me? It’d ease my mind so much.”
Dark lashes fell, then lifted again to reveal his clear-eyed gaze. “Okay. I don’t want people to worry ’bout me.”
“I know you don’t, Sam.” She thought of the boy’s father, remembering the look of stark fear that had come over his features when made to picture Sam’s accident—along with the anger in his eyes when he reprimanded her for putting more ideas into the boy’s head.
Perhaps Holden had been right in that judgment The last thing she wanted was for Sam to hurt himself again. Well, maybe her words to him now would help make up for that.
“You know, it might be best to stick to regular sports for a while,” she said. “Are there any you like you look forward to getting back to?”
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