The Secrets of Our Stars

After the bus crash at three years old, Elle had to learn to live through her hands. She learned how to walk, how to use a cane and wheelchair at once, what fights are worth fighting and what rumors are better left untouched. She found her friends, the ones who protected her when she couldn't herself. The ones who spoke for her when she couldn't speak for herself. The "bodyguards," as people called them. but even after twelve years of rehab, how is she supposed to learn how to live without her family? Without her sister's pizza pancakes, without the sibling band nights where she would play and they would sing together, without her dad's steady voice describing the stars at night wherever he was deployed. Without knowing if her mother truly loved her, and without waiting to hear the "yes" she so desperately wanted to hear.
Esther is hated among the kids in the orphanage. She's lucky to be with Elle, and she knows it. With her, Esther is her doppelgänger, her "sister," and neither girl bothered to correct that. Is it wrong that after living in and out of the Clarks' home, she feels like it was her siblings, too, that died?
the nightmares are leaving Amelia after little. She smiles like a teenager who found her first boyfriend when she's with Owen. He somehow makes those long ER shifts seem like they matter in uncharted ways. Maybe she should let go and listen to the people around her. It's been fifteen years. Maybe that baby wasn't hers. What if her therapist is right, that maybe that baby grew up in a family who loved her and is probably sailing through high school now? she should stop grieving a baby she had no right to... Right?
PLEASE NOTE: This story explores mature themes like trauma, abuse, disability, and medical fragility. Certain chapters will have specific content warnings for readers' caution.