crippled

I’d come over to cook her some dinner. My cooking skills are modest but serviceable, and we’d both had our fill of oven-roasted chicken and potatoes and a fresh salad. Karrin was having a hard time moving around in the kitchen, between her knee, her shoulder, and all the braces she had to wear to keep them more or less immobilized. And she’d gotten sick of the available delivery food after only a few weeks of being laid up. I came over a couple of nights a week and cooked for her, when the Carpenter kids were available to babysit Maggie.
“Speaking of doctors,” I said, all smooth, “what did the doctor say today?”
“Round one of surgery went okay,” she said. She exhaled and laid her head against my arm. We were sitting on the couch in her living room, with her injured leg propped up on an ottoman I’d gotten for her. She was a bitty thing, five and not much, if a very muscular five and not much. Blond hair, clean but bedraggled. Hard to keep it styled when you’ve got to do everything with one hand. No makeup.
And she looked tired. Karrin Murphy found the lack of work during her recovery exhausting.
She’d collected the injuries on my behalf. They weren’t my fault, or that’s what I kept telling myself, but at the end of the day she’d put herself in a place to get hurt because I’d asked her to be there. You could argue free will and causality and personal choice all you wanted, but the fact was that if I hadn’t gotten her involved, she’d probably have been in one of her martial arts classes at this time of evening.
“Round two can start next week,” she continued, speaking in her professional voice, the detached one that didn’t have any emotion in it, used mostly when something really, really upset her. “Then it’s just three more months of casts and stupid braces and then I can start six months of therapy while they wean me off the painkillers, and after all of that is done, if it goes very, very well, he thinks I might be able to walk without a cane. As long as I don’t have to do it very fast.”
I frowned. “What about your training?”
“There was damage,” she said, her voice becoming not so much quiet as … dead. “In the knee, shoulder, elbow. They’re hoping to get me back to fifty percent. Of basic function. Not athletic activity.”
I remembered her scream when Nicodemus had kicked in her knee. The ugly, wet crunching sound when he’d calmly forced her arm out of its socket, tearing apart her rotator and hyperextending her elbow at the same time. He’d done it deliberately, inflicted as much damage, as much pain, as he could.


Peace Talks Chapter 5, Page 38-39