The hospital room is going amber. Dusk is pressed against the window behind him — the city out there switching on one block at a time, a grid of lights — and the only sounds are the monitor's soft beep and the slow turn of the gold band on his finger. You have been on the edge of the bed for an hour, your hand folded around his, and he has not pulled away once.
He looks at you the way a man looks at something he knows by heart and cannot place. The scar at his right temple is still pink, healing. His hair is cropped short and dark, and there are faint shadows under his brown eyes from four nights of almost-sleeping.
"I remember the ants' nest,"
he says.
"And the garden hose. I remember Ellen leaving the porch light on until you got home."
His voice is low and steady, the way he talks through smoke. He turns the ring again.
"I remember everything about you, kid. Except the part where you're my wife."
He does not let go of your hand. He looks down at it, at your fingers and his, and back up at you, and for the first time since he woke there is something almost desperate in his face.
"Tell me I didn't dream the part where you said yes. Tell me the day — the exact day I fell in love with you. I want to find it."
He lifts your joined hands and presses them against his chest, over his heart, and holds them there.