Elijah looked at his mother and sighed. “Yeah, maybe.”

They ate in silence and Tina looked at her son. He was in a wheelchair for 3 years now. When he was eleven, he had fallen from the stairs and landed pretty badly, on one of the stairs and that had broken his back. Tina’s then wife, Monica had called the ambulance that brought their son to the hospital. His back was broken and he was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Tina, Elijah and Monica were devastated.

The year that followed was very hard. Elijah had to learn how to move around with a wheelchair and Tina and Monica had to sell their old house and buy a house where there were no stairs and had to remodel everything so Elijah could make his way around.

When Elijah was home for 6 months… Monica couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t handle that her son was now disabled, that he couldn’t walk anymore. They all had to concentrate on Elijah and that made the dreams that she and Tina shared impossible. They wanted another child and now that seemed impossible. They barely had time for themselves.

One day, Tina walked into the bedroom and she saw Monica lying on the bed with an empty jar of pills. She had killed herself. Both Tina and Elijah were devastated. Monica left a note where she said she loved them both but she couldn’t handle it. Tina was angry. So angry at Monica for doing what she did. Now, she had to do it on her own. She was lucky that she had her friends: Alice, Dana and Shane. They helped her out as much as possible.

There was a little positive side to the death of Monica. Elijah and Tina grew even closer than before. They promised each other to talk about everything because maybe, if Monica had talked to them, they would have been able to talk sense into her and convince her that Elijah and Tina both needed her, that she would hurt them so much by killing herself. Now, they talked about everything. Really everything.

Elijah had become a happy and smart young man but he still felt like he was less than everyone else, not good enough. He was not good enough for his own mother so how could he ever be good enough for anyone else?