Colin Cook lost his leg to a shark while surfing off Oahu. Sydney Corcoran was injured in the Boston Marathon bombing. Both were traumatized; both were struggling to return to normalcy. Then they found each other. Not just a viscerally moving story or a triumph of descriptive writing, this also happens to be a feel-good romance. A great way to remind yourself that bad things can happen to good people—and that those good people can still have beautiful things.
When she came to, she was in a medical tent, erected for marathon runners and now for survivors of the bombing. A battlefield triage unit where people took scissors to cut off her pants and said to each other, as if she couldn’t hear them, “Her eyes are white! Lips are purple! Get her in an ambulance!” She wanted to say how much this talk scared her, but the exhaustion. She couldn’t speak. She was so cold. She wished her family were here. Why was her family not here?
I am an orphan, she thought.
