The first time she woke up in his spare room, not that she recognized it as such, it was like clawing up through miles of crumbling darkness that dragged against every gain she made toward thinking. She’d swim up, pulling and fighting to hold on to an idea or even a question. She’d get as far as the wall of pain, then slip back to sleep before she could make sense of anything. She slid so deep that she hadn’t been dreaming. She couldn’t swear that she’d even been breathing except that she was still alive to wonder about it. She was just gone, unplugged, then plugged back in for rebooting. Over and over.

She was there for nine days, with the first two only accounted for by working backward on a calendar. Then nearly three days of the molasses swimming.

When she saw Owen for the first time, she thought she might finally be dreaming. Or possibly dead. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. Marcelline searched her catalog of impressions of him and realized that she could never have pictured him in anything but a dark suit, buttoning and unbuttoning the jacket when he sat down or stood up—smooth, graceful, as automatic as a machine.

A rippling soft crewneck on Owen Haig was all wrong. He had his costume like a paint job, as if he hung himself up in it every night and shrugged free of the hanger each morning, already set for business when he hit the floor. She could imagine him shooting his cuffs and straightening his tie, but that was about it. She slid her jaw sideways for a bolt of pain to test reality, just to be sure.

It was real.

And he was real.

He was there in the room with her and he didn’t always wear suits, and he had, apparently, given her a lot more thought over the time they’d known each other than she’d ever given him. She tried to make his having saved her life stay up top of the growing list of things that were on her mind.

Everything came back into focus. Gains were made by the hour and the day. The pain became understandable, and thereby bearable. She rediscovered her voice and a way to talk through a mouth that didn’t move right. She found that she could now remember, from one sleep to the next, where she was and what this was all about. But she wasn’t inclined to show her progress. Owen was kind, almost sappy, when she was weak and aching, but he sharpened as she did. He had a lot of questions about what had happened. She had a lot of questions about what was happening.