There were Band-Aids in the staff kitchen. Lily grabbed a crutch with one hand, the candelabra still gripped in the other. She leaned on her right leg, wincing at the pain, and held the candles out in front of her as she limped into the dark hall.

Lily was used to her crutches by now, but she hated them as much as ever. It had been almost seven years since she was first allowed to use them instead of her wheelchair, and that had been a year after the accident that had put her in it. She’d been on a trip with her church youth group, riding in the passenger seat of her friend’s mother’s minivan, when a pickup truck barreled into her car door.

Mostly, what she remembered about it was the way the other kids had screamed. They’d screamed so long and cried so hard it made Lily scream, too. Or that’s what she’d thought. Everyone told her she hadn’t made a sound, even when the police had to cut the van open to get her out.

The others got away with cuts and bruises, but not Lily. Lily, the doctors said over and over again, was lucky to be alive.

By the time she was allowed to ditch the wheelchair, Lily had missed close to a full school year, between the painful surgeries to fix her bones, reconstruct her ligaments, and make her legs somewhat functional again, and being stuck in the rehab facility with her tutors after that. Once she was finally deemed able to get around on crutches, Lily couldn’t face the kids at her old Catholic day school. She’d begged her parents to send her away to Acheron. There, just like back home, everyone who looked at her would see the crutches before they saw her. But at least they wouldn’t feel sorry for her, since they’d never seen her as anything else.

What all of them forgot—even Maria, sometimes—was that Lily wasn’t paralyzed. She could feel her legs, all right.

They hurt. All the time.

It had been sometime after the second surgery—the one that made her ache so badly she’d maxed out her morphine drip and her parents had hired a hypnotist and gotten her an oxy prescription—that Lily realized she couldn’t count on anyone else to make this better for her. Not her parents. Not their drugs. Certainly not her stupid hypnotist.

Not God, either. Lily had spent the first nine years of her life going to church and confession and believing God would take care of her. Then, when God had gotten His chance, He hadn’t bothered.

There was nothing out there. Nothing up in the sky or below the dirt or walking alongside them on the ground.