The kid with the Frisbee threw it one last time and then headed in to the beach. The dog chased it down and plucked it out of the foam of a breaking wave.

“In those first days after I came out of the coma,” Dryden said, “I remember asking my parents what had happened in those months I couldn’t remember. The end of the school year, the whole first half of summer. All that stuff was blank. I remember my dad telling me we’d actually been planning to move, because his firm wanted to transfer him to some regional HQ somewhere. He said we were already at the new place, living there for a few days, when the car accident happened. In the aftermath of it, he and my mom decided against the move. Decided to come back to L.A. and let me recover there. They told me all that in passing, like the move was no big deal. They didn’t really seem to want to talk about it. It was like, Don’t think about any of that stuff. Just focus on getting better. That’s all that matters. I remember friends saying, Yeah, you left, we had the whole going away party and everything. But compared to the accident itself, compared to almost dying, I hardly thought about the move at all. After the coma I spent a month mostly in bed, my brain still about halfway fogged over. By the time I was past all that, I don’t think the subject of moving away ever came up again. My parents sure as hell never brought it up. It was just this weird little detail that came and went.”

“Do you remember the name of the place? Where you moved to?”

Dryden shook his head. “If I ever heard it, it would have been during those weeks when my head was still cloudy. I don’t remember ever asking about it, later on. After a while I never even thought about it.”

His eyes trailed over the jotted bullet point again.

“Three or four months,” he said softly. “If I had to pin it down, I’d say that’s how big the gap in my memory was. Like early April to late July that year, 1989. I can remember looking back and trying to get a fix on the last thing I could recall before the coma, and it was spring break. After that there was nothing.”

He looked up from the notepad and met Danica’s gaze.

“When I saw this scrub file this morning,” Dryden said, “none of this even occurred to me. All my life, I never once questioned whether that accident really happened. Why would I? And this morning it never even crossed my mind as a dot to connect to all this.”

Danica looked away through the windshield. Dryden could still hear the dog barking, splashing around.