Your apartment always greeted Leon with the usual silence, saturated with the smell of old books and some elusive bitterness. For him, a rehabilitation doctor with many years of experience, it was another house where a patient was waiting for him. However, the case of your child, hit by a car and confined to a wheelchair at the age of twelve, was special. No one gave him hope that he would ever be able to walk again. Kennedy had seen hundreds of such stories. Children whose eyes first burned with desperate pleading, and then went out, leaving only emptiness. He learned to maintain professional detachment so as not to burn himself in the fire of someone else's grief. But the tears of this child, his complete, bottomless disappointment in the world, pierced his many years of armor. Perhaps because the doctor himself had never known the warmth of a family hearth, and the loneliness he considered his lot suddenly responded to someone else's pain with such piercing acuity. You, divorced, living without a husband, seemed just as lonely in your struggle. And Scott, without noticing it, began to penetrate your little world.

Each visit began the same way: Leon laid out his exercise machines, and the child, with a lifeless look, allowed himself to be done with whatever he wanted. Exhausting, monotonous exercises were a struggle not only with gravity, but also with despair. The doctor worked out every atrophied muscle, feeling the cold skin and the fragility of bones under his fingers. He patiently explained, encouraged, but deep down he knew that most often these were just words that had no weight.

That evening, everything was as usual. Kennedy, bending over the child's lower back, methodically worked out the muscles, trying to awaken at least some response. The small body was relaxed, like a rag doll. He pressed a little harder on the point where the epicenter of the injury had once been.

And suddenly…

A slight spasm ran down his back. The child’s body tensed.

“Ouch!” he let out a quiet, almost frightened exclamation.

Leon froze. His hand remained on his lower back. He had seen hundreds of spasms, phantom pains, random twitches. But this was something else. It was… reaction.

“What is it?” the therapist’s voice sounded unusually sharp, with notes he himself did not recognize. “Something… pricked. Down there. Like a needle,” the child turned his head in bewilderment. Scott slowly removed his hand. His heart was pounding in his chest like an alarm. Could it be?

He pressed the same point again, carefully. "Do you feel it?" the child winced, and a grimace flashed across his face. "Yes! It hurts! Again!"

Pain. Pure, sharp, live pain. Not phantom, not neuropathic. Pain that indicated that the nerve endings, condemned to eternal silence, woke up. They screamed.

Leon straightened up. His gaze fell on you, who were standing a little to the side, watching anxiously. In the doctor's eyes, usually so calm and analytical, some wild light was burning now.

You ran closer, your face pale from incomprehension and fear. He, barely holding back the emotions bursting out, took small, cool hands in his palms. "Pain is the first step. This is an incredible, huge step. And this means that you will be able to walk."

A deafening silence hung in the room. You covered your mouth with your hand, and the child looked at the doctor, his face slowly brightening, a timid but bright ray of light lit up in his eyes, so devastated just a minute ago.

“There is a chance. A huge chance. It will take a long time, it will be very difficult, and you will have to make incredible efforts. You need to keep trying. And we will do it. Together,” the doctor encouraged.

For the first time in a long time, there was no bitterness in your apartment, but the brightest of all stars lit up - the star of hope. And Kennedy, seeing this, felt how something inside him, which he had long considered dead, was also beginning to awaken. His loneliness seemed to fade before this miracle. Faded before you and your child.