“We can take you there,” I said. “We have a car. We’re going back. We can bring you with us.”

“I don’t want to see him,” she said, looking at me in surprise. “I never want to see him again.”

“I thought—I was sure you would want to—”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want anything to do with him. But it’s good to know where he is. Just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“In case she wakes up.”

We all looked through the doorway toward the woman.

“But who is she?” I asked.

“That’s Emily,” she said.

I stared at her blankly. Emily’s Bridge. Emily’s Bed. Emily’s Ghost.

“Who is Emily?” Tuck asked.

“His wife,” she said, impatient with us. “Anthony’s wife.”

“His wife,” I said. Anthony had more than a name. He had a past, a history, a home, furniture, pots and pans, and food in a fridge, and—I was swirling with the news of it—it made him a man, not a ghost at all, someone who was once a young man falling in love.

I felt these facts settle in me, with a mixture of emotions. To know something like this about him, finally, after so many months of only guessing, filled me with something like elation. But I felt sorrow, too, without understanding why. I felt that I was losing something. For instance, I knew suddenly with certainty that the history class he told people we took together in college, that was the history class he took with Emily. And the sound of the train, that was a sound he heard with her. And the crows were crows in trees outside the window when he was falling in love with her. I had always resented those false memories, but now they felt worse than false, they felt stolen. It wasn’t that they didn’t belong to me—they belonged to another woman, and I had no right to them.

I felt a surge of anger. He’d had—and left behind—the very thing he claimed to want so badly now. Family. All this time he’d been slowly leading my brother away from me, and he’d had a family of his own. A wife! When he’d held me, put his mouth on me. A wife and a mother! A mother. And my mother was gone and never coming back. He’d had everything, but he’d wanted more. I thought I might need to stand up and walk down the hallway just to keep from exploding with the pressure and confusion of feelings.

“Wait—what do you mean if she wakes up?” Tuck asked.

“Didn’t he tell you anything?” she asked.

“She’s in a coma?” I said, understanding suddenly. “He put her in a coma.”

I stood up, and the folding chair’s legs lifted and banged on the floor of the hospital hallway.