He shambled forward in a lurching, unsteady gait that probably made her think he could fall at any moment. He’d fallen a lot, gotten up more.

“Matthew?” She moved toward him, her face tilted up.

Her beauty made him want to cry. He wanted to tell her that when he painted, he felt her, remembered her, that it had started in rehab as occupational therapy and now it was his passion. Sometimes when he was painting he could forget all of it, the pain, the memories, the loss, and imagine a future with Leni, their love like sunshine and warm water. He imagined them having kids, growing old together. All of it.

He strained to find all those words. It was like suddenly being in a dark room. You knew there was a door, but you couldn’t find it.

Breathe, Matthew. Stress made it worse.

He drew in a breath, released it. He limped over to the bedside table, picked up the box full of the letters she’d sent him all those years ago, while he was in the hospital, and the others, the ones she’d sent when he was a grief-stricken kid in Fairbanks. They were how he’d learned to read again. He handed it to her, unable to ask the question that had haunted him: Why did you stop writing to me?

She looked down, saw her letters in the box, and looked up at him. “You kept them? After I left you?”

“Your letters,” he said. He knew the words were elongated; he had to concentrate to create the combinations he wanted. “Were how I. Learned to read again.”

Leni stared up at him.

“I prayed. You’d. Come back,” he said.

“I wanted to,” she whispered.

He gave her a smile, knowing how it pulled down the skin at his eye, made him look even more freakish.

She put her arms around him and he was amazed at how they still fit together. After all the ways he’d been put back together, restrung and bolted up; they still fit together. She touched his scarred face. “You are so beautiful.”

He tightened his hold on her, tried to steady himself, feeling suddenly, inexplicably afraid.

“Are you okay? Are you in pain?”

He didn’t know how to say what he was feeling, or he was afraid that if he said it, she’d think less of him. He’d been drowning for all of these years without her, and she was the shore he’d been flailing to find. But surely she would look into his ravaged, stitched-together face and run away, and then he would drift back into the deep, dark waters alone.