His breathing grew shallow.
“Six years?” he whispered.
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“You moved back to Greyhaven several months after the time you remember. You took a position at Callahan Marine Works.”
His gaze flicked toward me.
“You built a life here,” Dr. Whitcomb continued. “The accident injured areas of your brain involved in autobiographical memory. Right now, you cannot access much of the last six years.”
“Cannot access,” he repeated. “Meaning gone.”
“Not necessarily. Memory is not stored like a row of files in one cabinet. Injury can interrupt the pathways used to reach it. Some people recover substantial portions. Some recover fragments. Some have lasting gaps.”
“When?”
“We don’t know.”
His right hand tightened in the sheet.
“What do I remember?”
“That’s what we’re learning.”
Dr. Whitcomb asked about his childhood.
He named his elementary school, the street where they lived, the dog he had at twelve. He remembered Leah breaking her wrist on a trampoline. He remembered their mother’s habit of burning Sunday pancakes.
He remembered electrical formulas and certification standards.
He remembered how to test a circuit.
He did not remember Greyhaven’s rebuilt waterfront, though it had opened four years ago.
He did not remember Marlowe.
He did not remember Caleb or Owen.
Each absence seemed to take something physical from him.
Leah showed him a photograph from the previous Christmas. Noah stood beside her in our apartment, wearing a paper crown and holding a ruined pie. Marlowe sat at their feet, waiting for disaster to become food.
Noah studied it.
“That’s me.”
“Yes,” Leah said.
“And you.”
“Yes.”
His attention moved over the room in the background.
“Where?”
