“Here.”
“Yes. Right here.”
He settled onto his right side.
Marlowe climbed onto the rug beneath the couch.
I sat close enough for Noah to reach me and offered my hand.
He laced his fingers through mine.
His eyelids lowered.
“Do the whistle.”
I did.
Two short notes.
One long.
Noah’s mouth curved.
“I found you.”
“You did.”
He fell asleep still holding my hand.
Chapter 13
NOAH
For the first time since I had opened my eyes in the hospital, I possessed something no one had handed me.
It was not a line in a medical report.
Not an image on my phone showing my own face arranged inside a life I could not reach.
Not one of the stories Leah or Caleb or Owen told with careful pauses, each of them waiting to see whether recognition would spark behind my eye.
The whistle was mine.
Mine and Reid’s.
I could not remember the first time he had used it. I could not see him standing across the yard, fingers at his mouth, calling me through the roar of an engine or the metallic shriek of the travel lift. I could not picture myself at the end of a dock, turning because those three notes had found me through wind, machinery, and distance.
But I knew what they meant.
My body knew.
That was the most unsettling truth about amnesia: knowledge did not live in one place.
Doctors described memory as though the brain were a house after a flood. Some rooms remained dry. Some were ruined beyond repair. Objects drifted into places they did not belong. A photograph might survive while the name beneath it washed away.
The comparison sounded reasonable in a hospital room.
Living inside the wreckage did not.
