“Yes, but I don’t want him alone for the next forty-eight hours. The effects can linger.”

“No problem. I’ll stick with him until his parents arrive from Auckland.”

“If they were planning to fly in, they’re out of luck.” The doctor nodded to the window behind Catie. “Big, once-in-a-century snowstorm swirling outside. All flights grounded. It’s forecast to get worse before it passes. I’m discharging you now so you can get home before it gets too dangerous on the roads.”

Dr. Smitherson was as good as her word, and Danny walked out of the ward only minutes later.

“I called one of those fancy executive cabs,” Catie told him. “You know, the ones that advertise about being super confidential. If the driver blabs anyway, we’ll pretend I fell and had to get my prostheses checked out and you came with me.”

Danny was used to Catie’s quick mind, but it was too quick for him today. “Catie, I can’t think quite right.”

She slipped her hand into his, slender and warm and with calluses from her weight work. “Lingering effects, remember? Doc also gave me a bit of advice about food and drink while you were in the bathroom, so we’ll start that, try to get your body into the right state.”

He looked down at their clasped hands. Funny, how delicate she was, though he never thought of her that way—but while Catie was honed and sleek, a bullet on the race track, her hand was all slender bones, and it held his with fierce power. Telling him it was okay if he leaned on her; she could handle it.

Curling his bigger, browner, blunt-tipped fingers around hers, he said, “I’m incapacitated. This doesn’t count.”

No one else would’ve understood. Catie grinned. “Granted. This does not go on the scoreboard.”

The taxi driver proved to be an older guy who was far more interested in Catie’s prosthetic feet than anything to do with Danny. She’d worn skin-hugging black capris that exposed her high-tech ankle joints, her equally high-tech feet clad in gold-sequined sneakers.

Catie chatted away to the driver as the taxi crawled through the snowy streets, the silence beyond a soft hush. She’d told him once that she liked talking about her prostheses. “As long as people aren’t rude and are just curious,” she’d said. “I figure if I can help them see prosthetic limbs as nothing strange, just a normal aid, it might help another amputee who isn’t as comfortable talking about this stuff. Plus, I mean, my hardware is wicked cool.”

By the time the taxi came to a stop outside a building Danny didn’t recognize, the driver had asked for a selfie with Catie and was planning to tell his grandchildren about the famous runner he’d met. He ignored Danny.