“Someone must have given my parents the same script they gave yours,” she said. The disbelief was still there in her voice. “Hit and run accident, July 1989. Coma, screwed-up memory for the few months leading up to it. Everything from Easter to late July … gone. Like a bunch of pages torn out of a book.”

Her eyes narrowed as she thought about it.

“My family moved to some new place, too, during the time I couldn’t remember. For my dad’s job. But I think I was actually there for a while—not just a few days. More like a few months. I remember my parents telling me we’d lived there almost the whole time I couldn’t remember. They seemed kind of hung up on that, actually. Like they really, really wanted to know if I could remember any of it. In those weeks when I was recovering, they asked me about it all the time.”

“Did you remember any of it?”

Danica shook her head. “Nothing. And they were weird about telling me anything, whenever I asked them about it. I remember finding that so odd. On the one hand, they wanted to know if any of it was coming back to me, but they never wanted to answer any of my questions about that place. They acted like none of it mattered. They might have even said what your parents said, word for word: Focus on getting better. That’s all that matters.”

“They never told you the name of the place?”

“If they did, I don’t remember. I really doubt they did, though. It’s funny how things like that can work: if people keep dodging a subject long enough, you feel uncomfortable bringing it up. So it just … goes away. It did go away. I think after a while I just thought the subject bugged them because they’d almost lost me. It made sense, even. What parent wants to dwell on something like that? And I never really got to ask my old friends about it, because when we moved back to L.A., it was to a different area. I’d grown up in Long Beach, but we lived up in the valley after that summer. And then my parents got divorced, and my mom married Carl, and we lived in that house in Thousand Oaks. I don’t think I ever talked to my friends from Long Beach after the coma. The whole thing was like a dividing line in my life. There was before, and there was after. And four months of nothing in between.”

For thirty seconds neither spoke. They sat there, staring at the handwritten bullet point and the stacked pages of the scrub file.

Danica trailed her fingertip over the header. WITNESS NULLIFICATION [C43-YANKEE]—PERSONS 2855 & 2856.

“You and me,” she said softly. “I guess we met back then, for however long. And neither one of us was in a traffic accident.”