The first thing Lewis remembered was the sound of nothing.

No engines. No crowd. No race.

Just a faint, rhythmic beeping. A sterile ceiling. The ache of awareness returning like a tide he couldn’t stop.

His body didn’t feel like his. His chest moved, barely. His arms, stiff but present. But below that—nothing. No tingling. No ache. Just absence.

The doctor had spoken gently, but the words cracked like thunder: T12 complete spinal cord injury. Paralyzed from the waist down.

The world had tilted then. Everything he’d built, fought for, become—it all crashed with the car. The championship. The legacy. The control. Gone in a second on turn nine.

Now, weeks later, Lewis sat in a rehab room surrounded by silence, sunlight, and a therapist trying not to look too cautious. His legs lay motionless beneath a blanket. He hated looking at them.

They were his, but they felt like they belonged to someone else now.

There was no helmet. No team radio. No cheers.

Just the hum of fluorescent lights. The soft voice of a nurse. The tug of muscle bands as they started gentle upper-body work.

He didn’t speak much—not at first. When visitors came, he wore a smile like a mask. But when the door closed and the lights dimmed, the weight of it came crushing back. The fear. The rage. The guilt of surviving when so many expected him to race again.