She shoved me away playfully, but I knew she was pleased. We’d spent a lot of sleepless nights while she was pregnant and after Ellie was born, and sometimes Karly would sit by the fire and murmur poems into the voice recorder on her phone. She said she didn’t know where the words came from; it was almost as if they just sprang into her head from someone else’s mind. To her surprise, when she let her father read them, he said they were good. He sent them to his publisher, who thought they were good, too.

I wasn’t surprised at all.

Karly inhaled the atmosphere of the park. She still had some pent-up energy. We’d already been here for hours, walking, kissing, talking, sampling foods, but Karly wanted to make the most of our one night of freedom. Her parents had Ellie until morning, so this was our time to be lovers again.

Her face glowed as she spied on the people around us. That had always been one of her gifts, to glory in the happiness of others. The older woman on the bench, with her head on her husband’s shoulder. The two ten-year-olds kicking a soccer ball back and forth on the grass. A street performer juggling bowling pins for tips. A woman in a purple sports bra, jogging toward us, caught up in whatever music she was listening to on her earbuds.

Different people, happy lives.

My happiness was seeing the light in my wife’s face. I saw that light when she was holding our daughter. And when she was lying next to me in bed. I saw that same kind of light in my own eyes, too, whenever I looked in the mirror. That was a new experience for me.

Peace.

“Do you want to go dancing?” Karly suggested.

“I want to do absolutely everything with you. Where should we go?”

Karly kept watching the people in the park come and go, her eyes traveling from face to face. “How about the Spybar? We can pretend we’re still young and hip.”

“The Spybar,” I murmured darkly.

I looked away at the lake, where the water glistened with reflected lights, and I tried to swallow down a moment of anxiety. Karly was too preoccupied to notice my hesitation. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my coma dreams anymore, but the very mention of the Spybar took me back to that night when music pounded in my ears and my beautiful, beautiful wife was bleeding to death in my arms.

Some moments you just can’t shake. They are with you forever. I had to remind myself that, as vivid as it was, that moment had never actually happened. It was a fantasy played out inside my head while I was lying in a hospital bed.

“Sure,” I replied. “The Spybar. Let’s go.”