Art squeezed the tip of it ever so gently, feeling the bone inside. His eyes were round. “You can feel that?”

“Oh yes. It’s like the other fingers, only a bit more sensitive maybe.”

“Because it’s new.”

“I suppose.”

Only the old lost finger was implicated, somehow; the ghost was calling again, now that there were signals coming from that end of the hand. The finger in the brain, Art called it. And no doubt there really was a cluster of brain cells devoted to that finger, which had been the ghost all along. It had faded over the years from lack of stimulus, but now it too was growing back, or being restimulated or reinforced; Vlad’s explanations of the phenomenon were complex. But these days when she felt the finger, it sometimes felt just as large as the one on the other hand, even when she was looking right at it. Like feeling an invisible shell over the new one. Other times she felt the little thing at its proper size, short and skinny and weak. She could bend it at the hand knuckle, and just a little at the middle knuckle. The last kuckle, behind the fingernail, wasn’t there yet. But it was on its way. Growing. Again Nadia joked about it growing on and on, though it was a creepy thought. “That would be good,” Art said. “You’d have to get a dog.”

But now she felt confident that wouldn’t happen. The finger seemed to know what it was doing. It would be all right. It looked normal. Art was fascinated by it. But not just by it. He massaged her hand, which was a bit sore, and then her arm and shoulders too. He would massage all of her if she let him. And judging by how her finger and arm and shoulders felt, she certainly ought to. He was so relaxed. Life for him was still a daily adventure, full of marvels and hilarity. People made him laugh every day; that was a great gift. Big, round-faced, round-bodied, somewhat like Nadia herself in certain aspects of appearance; balding, unpretentious, graceful on his feet. Her friend.