I added:
Woke saying his name.
The sentence looked small on the page.
It felt enormous inside me.
I set the journal down and waited for my mind to catch up with the fact that I was awake.
That delay happened every morning.
The world arrived first. Meaning followed.
Window.
Rain.
Dog.
Couch.
Apartment.
Greyhaven.
I was Noah Bennett.
I was thirty-three, not twenty-seven.
The year was not the year I remembered.
I had lived here for six years.
I had survived an accident I could not recall in any ordinary way.
Reid Callahan was downstairs running a boatyard that was partly his business, partly his family, and apparently the place where I had built most of the missing version of my life.
He was also the man I had loved.
The man I might be learning to love again.
That thought should have felt complicated.
It did.
But complication took energy, and my brain rationed energy like a city during a blackout.
At the moment, the strongest signal came from my bladder.
Some systems remained brutally efficient.
I lowered the couch footrest and waited until the room stopped shifting. The powered chair stood beside the couch, angled exactly where Reid had left it. He always anticipated the next movement without making it obvious that he was doing so.
I transferred slowly.
Left foot planted.
Weight forward.
