She runs her finger past my nose, and I take in the square room.

Everything here is dairy colored. Milk-colored walls. Butter-colored ceiling. Wrinkled popcorn curtain. White-cheddar light from a window behind my head. Maybe I’m just hungry. I don’t know. My stomach’s disappeared to some undefinable place. Mouth full of cotton. Lips splitting. Tongue so dry it’s stuck behind my teeth.

Danae notes my heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature. Checks my blood oxygen level. Her hands avoid my skin.

“It’s Monday. November eighteenth,” she says. “You’ve been unconscious for three days.”

I close my eyes. Three days?

I reach for them, but my memories are haze, thin as smoke swallowed by a pitiless white-hot blaze. My arms won’t move, and I panic. Paralyzed, I think. But I kick my legs and razors shoot through my side, a beautiful constellation of nociceptors in my skin and nerve fibers radiating up my spinal cord. But aside from the pain, I have three days of nothing. Three days disconnected from the world. Three days of neurons fastened like tiny islands. Body bound to bed. Life speeding along without me.

“We had to restrain you,” Danae tells me, drawing my attention to the tan padded cuffs circling my wrists and clinging to the white plastic bedframe.

I kick my legs again.

“I can restrain your ankles, too.” There’s no laughter in her voice.

But that was the last of my energy, and I collapse in on myself.

“The firefighters said you were speaking German. Deutsch. Do I need to find someone who speaks German?” She taps her clipboard, voice rising with impatience. “It says here you were born at Northside Hospital.” She pauses for effect. “In Atlanta.”

She puts the clipboard down and her hands move to her narrow hips. I smell scorched leather and burning lavender. See dark mustaches and bloodred lips. My skin’s on fire. I can’t breathe.

“Do you speak English?” she says loudly and slowly, enunciating each syllable, as the walls around me go up in flames. “Spre-ken Zee Eng-lish?”

“Of course, I speak English,” I say, irritated to hear the words come out garbled and wet. “Ofufspegl” or something like that, and where moments before there was nothing, I have the sensation of drool on my chin.

“And what language is that?” She cocks a painted swoop of an eyebrow, and I suspect she’s enjoying this.

Someone must have told her I’m a cop.

She lifts my gown and prods my side. “I’ll be back in two hours to change your dressings,” she tells me. Then she pulls a butterscotch-and-lime curtain around my bed and marches out of the room.

The light is slanting against the far wall, Danae’s gone, and the curtain separating me from the cream walls has disappeared behind my head.

“Jesus,” Teddy says when he sees me.