A Change of Heart

by Sonali Dev

Genres: Asian American; Women's Fiction; Multicultural & Interracial Romance

Synopsis

Dr. Nikhil “Nic” Joshi had it all—marriage, career, purpose—until, while working for Doctors without Borders in a Mumbai slum, his wife, Jen, discovered a black market organ-transplant ring. Before she could expose the truth, Jen was killed.

Two years after the tragedy, Nic is a cruise ship doctor who spends his days treating seasickness and sunburn and his nights in a boozy haze. On one of those blurry evenings on deck, Nic meets a woman who makes a startling claim: she received Jen’s heart in a transplant and has a message for him. Nic wants to discount Jess Koirala’s story as absurd, but there is something about her reckless desperation that resonates despite his doubts.

Jess has spent years working her way out of a nightmarish life in Calcutta and into a respectable Bollywood dance troupe. Now she faces losing the one thing that matters—her young son. She needs to uncover the secrets Jen risked everything for; but the unforeseen bond that results between her and Nic is both a lifeline and a perilous complication.

Delving beyond the surface of modern Indian-American life, acclaimed author Sonali Dev’s page-turning novel is both riveting and emotionally rewarding—an extraordinary story of human connection, bravery, and hope.

Release date: September 27, 2016

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 342

Sample

Nikhil’s head felt like someone had squeezed it through a liquidizer. Whiskey burn stung his brain as if he had snorted the stuff instead of pouring it down his gullet. He leaned into the polished brass railing, letting the wind pummel his face. The ship, all twenty-four floors of behemoth decadence, was like the damn Burj Al Arab speeding across the Caribbean. And yet the only way to know they were moving was to watch the waves. His fingers released the glass sitting on the railing and it flew into the night, disappearing long before it hit the inky water.

He imagined hopping on the railing, imagined being that glass. Boom! And it would be over. Finally, there’d be peace.

The sky was starting to ignite at the edges, as though the glass of Jack he’d just tossed into the night had splattered amber flecks across the horizon. It would go up in flames soon. All of it orange and gold when the sun broke through the rim of the ocean. It was time for him to leave. The last thing he needed was the mockery of another breaking dawn.

“Sir, why don’t you stay and watch today?” A man leaned on his mop, staring at Nikhil from under his windblown hair, that tentative, guilty look firmly in place. The look people couldn’t seem to keep off their faces when they talked to Nikhil—the one that announced, rather loudly, that they were terrified of intruding. Because The Pathetic Dr. Joshi with the giant hole in his heart might break down right before their eyes.

“Very beautiful it is, no?” The man pointed his chin at the burgeoning sunrise that had just pumped Nikhil’s lungs full of pain, and waited for a response. But while the blazing pain in Nikhil’s heart was functioning at full capacity, the booze incapacitated his tongue. He wanted to react, wanted to have a conversation with the man who was obviously starved for it. He searched for words to say, but he came up empty.

Now there was a word: empty.

Still empty after two years.

The deckhand’s smiling mouth drooped into a frown. He turned away and started working the spotless floor with his mop. Shit, had he just thought of the man as a deckhand? Jen would have clonked him upside the head for it. Jen would’ve—

“What’s your name?” Conversation was better than the high-definition telecast of memories that kicked off in his brain.

“Gavin.” The man looked surprised. “From Goa. In India.”

Great. Goa. Jen’s favorite place in the whole world.

The steady boat pitched beneath Nikhil’s feet. His stomach lurched. The world somersaulted around him. He leaned over the brass railing and tried not to throw up his guts.

He failed. When the heaving stopped, the world was still spinning too fast. He lifted his T-shirt and wiped the foul-smelling puke off his mouth. Gavin from Goa was walking across the deck with a bottle of water in his hand.

Nikhil should have thanked him, should’ve told him he was fine. Instead he turned toward the stairs. In the light of day he could talk to people, pretend to be alive, but now when the world was as dark as his insides, he couldn’t. The stairs dived into the lower deck. He grabbed the railing and stumbled down, landing on his ass on the last step.

The smell of chlorine from the three-tiered pool cut past the smell of regurgitated Jack on his shirt, setting off the churning in his stomach again. He pulled himself up and dragged himself to the elevator, rubbing his face on his shoulder like the snotty, cranky brat he used to be. But no tears came to dilute the unrelenting burn of wanting.

How could it be that he was still here? The sunset, the sunrise, it was all still here when she was gone.

He wanted her back. God. Please. Give her back to me.

“Look what you’ve done to yourself, Spikey.”

His head snapped up. He didn’t remember stepping out of the elevator, but he spun around now, his breath loud in the absolute silence. The brightly lit corridor swirled around him. The bloodred carpet, the gold-striped walls, every inch of garish splendor echoed that word.

“Spikey.”

There wasn’t a soul in sight.

He followed the echoing word across the hallway and around the corner, his racing heart dragging the rest of his body along. He turned the corner, expecting to see nothing. Expecting to chase the sound the way he’d been chasing his dead wife’s memories for two years.

A shadow clad in black stood all the way across the corridor. A wisp of dark against the overpowering gold of the walls. Bright red strands cascaded around her face and into her jaw in a razor-sharp edge. Hair he knew better than he knew his own name.

He reached out and leaned into the wall, but the ship continued to seesaw beneath him. She held steady for a moment and then she was gone, melting around the corner.

He sprang after her, running until he was standing in the spot she’d been in. Another long corridor stretched out in front of him. It showed no signs of life, only an endless line of doors connected by endless golden molding, and the endless buzz of the lights overhead.

The walls closed in around him, forcing him to stumble forward. His breath ricocheted against the heavily textured wallpaper.

And then there she was again, a flash of red hair peeking around the corner. He ran at it, at her. But his drunken legs tripped over themselves and he splattered flat on his face, arms and legs splayed like a dead arthropod someone had swatted into the floor.

When he lifted his head she was gone.

His face fell back on the rough, deep pile of the carpet with its polythene smell, and everything went black. Everything except the panacean sound of that name.

Spikey.

Only one person called him that.

Jen, his wife. And she’d been dead for two years.

Nikhil woke up to the sound of drums beating inside his cerebral cortex. And to claws plucking at his spinal cord as if it were a string on the guitar that still hung on the wall of his childhood room in his parents’ home.

Pain vibrated down each vertebra, his usual wake-up call. He knew enough not to sit up immediately, because steady as the boat was, his inner boat would pitch and rock like a rabid Jell-O cup until he made it to the toilet and emptied his innards through his mouth and nose. So much for the comfort of morning rituals.

He was in his own bed. Although he didn’t remember getting here. He lifted the sheet off his bare chest and rubbed his wife’s misspelled name tattooed across his left pec. His running shorts were still in place over his jutting pelvic bones. They had always been prominent after he’d lost his chubby-kid fat in college. But now they were sharp enough to cut through skin. He pressed his hand into the knife-edged rise of bone, the exact place Jen had liked to hold when—

He sat up too fast. Bile jelly-wobbled up his esophagus bringing back everything that had happened before he had passed out in that corridor. The over-deodorized smell of carpet. The flash of red hair. He tried to fight it, but his brain traced back his steps until it hit up against that word.

Spikey.

His wife had taken to calling him that after he’d told her how Spikey The Dinosaur had been his favorite TV show in elementary school. He had been a little obsessed with the young stegosaurus who wanted nothing more than for everyone to be happy, who always did the right thing, who had everything a little dinosaur could ask for but was always on the verge of losing it all. Nikhil’s mother still had his Spikey toy collection stored in the basement.

When he’d shown it to Jen, she had twirled her fingers in his hair, finding that sensitive spot at the top of his head. Your hair stands up in spikes just like Spikey, Spikey.

He scrubbed his hand over the hair he now kept cropped down to a skull trim, over the scar slashing down the back of his head where they had cracked open his skull. Sometimes that sort of thing took your memories. With him it had jackhammered the memories into his brain. And what did you do with memories of your wife having her neck snapped in an alley while they held you down and made you watch what they did to her?

The newly grown hair scraped like a hundred two-sided needles into his palm and his scalp. Jen would have hated his shaved head. Hated it. She had loved his hair. She had loved every stupid thing about him. For the life of him he hadn’t known why.

“What is wrong with you?” he’d asked her once.

“Actually, my weakness for men with pathetic self-esteem is my only flaw,” she’d told him. She’d been more than a little pissed at him for asking.

He threw the sheets back and pushed his legs off the bed.

Look what you’ve done to yourself, Spikey.

She had been so real. The hair framing her face, that blasted hair color he’d hated so much. It had been so damn real. Maybe it was time to stop chugging the Jack. The whole point of it was to shut the memories down, not to bring them to life.

He reached out and gripped the nightstand to steady the endless pitching in his stomach. Then yanked his hand back when his fingers landed on two bright white pills on a writing pad. His thumb found its way to his wedding band and went to work, rotating it around his finger at a maddening skip. Around and around.

He knew the slanting scrawl on the pad. The T flying off the page; the g looping around on itself.

He knew what the note said even before he read it.

Fuck.

His Jen was back.

One of these days she’d get used to calling herself Jess. Just think of it as a role, he had told her. Of course she thought of it as a role. How else could she possibly do this?

There had been a time when she would have given anything to be someone else, to have a new name, a new history. A fresh slate. Pure again. But there was nothing pure about what she was doing. It was yet another rebirth right into the gutter.

Speaking of gutters, she tried not to think about the smell of vomit in Dr. Nikhil Joshi’s room when she had dragged him there last night and left him sprawled on his bed. Maybe pulling off his shirt had been stupid. What if he had woken up? But knowing he was Jen’s husband, she just hadn’t been able to leave him in soiled clothes. Which was definitely stupid because the sympathy squeezing in her chest was an indulgence she absolutely could not afford.

The good doctorsaab’s vomit had smelled like the hell he seemed to be trapped in. Booze and bile. Excess and starvation.

His ribs had been so stark against his skin, shades lighter than the burned tan of his forearms and face. The desire to toss his T-shirt into the trash had been strong, but only because she couldn’t burn it. Instead she had dumped it on the scattered pile of laundry in the corner of his room, done what she needed to do, and left. Hanging around his kind of pain gouged out all her scabs, and she needed her scabs.

It had been a week. A full week away from her baby. The garish splendor of her shoebox-sized room did nothing to keep it from feeling like a jail cell. All she wanted was to be back in her little flat in Mumbai, with her baby in her arms. Being so far away from him made her feel scattered, as though all of her were parts and pieces floating around without glue. Before this, she’d never left him for so much as a day. Those two days when he’d disappeared, when they’d taken him from her, were something she couldn’t think about right now. If she thought about that, she wouldn’t be able to get through this.

She picked up her phone. She needed to hear his voice. Calls to Mumbai from the cruise ship were obscenely priced. Good. Because she wasn’t the one paying for them. The thought of making the bastard who was paying for the calls pay for something, for anything, gave her a breath of satisfaction.

“Hello, darling.” The husky sweetness of Sweetie Raja’s voice released some of the tension in her body. Putting people at ease was her flatmate’s special gift. She sank into the tiny bunk bed and slipped off her ballet flats, flexing her toes and stretching out her calves. If she wasn’t able to dance soon, she was going to explode.

“Hi, Sweetie, is Joy up yet?”

“I’m fine, darling, thank you so much for asking.”

“I’m sorry. Everything okay with you?”

He laughed. She could imagine his gorgeous ponytail swaying to his laughter, his kohl-lined eyes sparkling beneath lashes that drove women wild with envy and men wild with confusion.

“You’re apologizing? Who are you, and what did you do with my best friend?” he asked, still laughing.

“Ignore me. I’ll be my unapologetic bitchy self when I get back. Promise.”

The laughter in his voice turned to worry. “Listen to you. You sound exhausted. When was the last time you got some sleep?”

“I’m fine.”

Sweetie knew she couldn’t talk about it. He hadn’t once asked for details. This was why he was her best friend. He was completely at ease around secrets.

“Joy’s brushing his teeth. You know you need your strength for the audition next month,” he said.

She mumbled something. She knew Sweetie had pulled every string he could to get her the audition with Bollywood’s top dance troupe. A dream she could almost touch after working toward it for five years. And here she was a million miles away, where the last thing on her mind was which bloody troupe she danced with.

He called out to Joy. “Joy, Mamma’s on the phone, son. Brushing done?”

Her baby’s sweet mouth had to be dripping white foam. The bubblegum smell of his toothpaste lumped in her throat. She always made him count ten brushstrokes for each tooth and he did it as though her word were law. Seven-year-olds were supposed to be willful, but it had probably never even occurred to Joy that he could argue with her.

“Mamma?”

With every one of her senses she gathered up his voice. “Hi, Joyboy.”

“Ten times on each tooth. I counted.” Her sweet, sweet baby.

“You sure?” she said as sternly as she could manage. “Because, you don’t—”

“I know, I know, I don’t want worms to dig holes in my enal-bum.”

“Germs, babu, not worms.”

She heard a soft smack. His palm striking his forehead and a self-conscious cluck. “Yeah, yeah, that.”

“Are you taking good care of Sweetie-mamu?”

“I’m trying, but he won’t stop drinking so many coffees. I told him you’d be angry if you found out. But . . .” There was a pause, and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “But he told me not to tell you.”

She laughed, and the sweet pain in her heart made her whole again. “You keep trying. All we can do is try, remember?”

“Mamma?”

“Yeah, babu?”

“I made you something in school. But you don’t have to come home soon to see it. Sheila-teacher said she’ll keep it carefully for you, okay?”

It took her a moment to respond without letting her voice crack. “Mamma will be home as soon as she can. And you know what?”

“Yes, yes, I know. I know your heart is with me. And yes, yes, I’m taking care of it for you.”

“Good, because hearts are important.” Her hand went to her chest. The still unfamiliar raised scar pushed into her hand. It was only fair that it still hurt. “I love you, my Joy-baby-boy. Mamma’s kissing you and holding you. Can you feel it?”

There was silence on the phone, and she knew he had squeezed his eyes shut, imagining her arms around him. “Did you feel mine?”

“Of course I did. But I didn’t hear the kiss.”

The smacking of his lips was so loud and clear she soaked up the sound and held on to it.

“I love you most in the world, Mamma.”

“Hey!” Sweetie’s voice was back on the phone. “What about me?”

“Is he rolling his eyes at you?” she asked, biting her lip.

“Of course he is. And he does it even better than you.”

“Thanks, Sweetie.” Her teeth dug into her lip. Tears were a luxury she couldn’t afford either.

“Thank me by coming home safe.”

She made an incoherent sound and let him go. Her safety wasn’t the issue. How she wished it was, but it wasn’t.

She watched Jen’s Nikhil tuck his white uniform shirt into his white pants and walk out of the clinic. He always seemed to move as if an invisible crane were pulling him forward, always against his will.

Why a doctor had to dress like a cruise ship purser she had no idea, but despite the fact that the uniform was ironed and clean, he managed to make it look almost as soiled as his vomit-streaked T-shirt from last night.

For all the effort she had put into preparing herself to come face-to-face with him, seeing him fall flat on his face like a roadside drunkard while trying to chase her down a corridor was the last thing she had expected. Actually, the horrid sadness it set off inside her was the last thing she had expected. Usually, she liked nothing more than to see a man fall flat on his face and get hurt. It was like poetry to her, watching them in pain instead of inflicting it.

She took a deep breath, adjusted the hood of her sweatshirt so it covered her head, and followed him into the elevator, sliding into the back corner behind him. Not that he noticed her. Not that he noticed anything. He seemed to have no idea that there was a world around him and that it was spinning away with or without him.

Even if he did happen to wake up from his stupor, there was no chance in hell that he would recognize her from yesterday. Not with her hair stuffed into a hairband and hidden away under the thick fleece-lined fabric.

She still couldn’t believe what hair extensions could do. All her life she had hated her wispy hair. Now that the heavier healthier strands had been tacked on to her head, all she felt was the awful weight of them. But if his dead wife’s hair was what it took to get his attention, then that’s what it took.

He had been at the clinic since nine in the morning. It was almost seven p.m. now. He hadn’t stepped out of the clinic for ten hours, not even to eat lunch. He had the look of someone who had spent a year in a famine-ridden nation. Skin over bone. No quilting of muscle or fat. But unlike those pictures of starving people from famines, there was no hunger in his eyes. There was, in fact, absolutely nothing in his eyes.

The elevator started to move, and the strange tension in her belly heightened. Closed spaces made her jittery, especially when she was trapped in one with a man. The elevator bounced to a halt. Nikhil didn’t move.

This was his floor. He was messing up her plan. She cleared her throat. He straightened and dragged himself out.

With a finger on the door-open button, she waited for him to be far enough away that he couldn’t reach her before the door closed. Then she yanked back her hood, tugged Jen’s hair out of the band, and shook it out so it covered most of her face.

“Spikey . . .” She whispered the word as the door started to slide. It was almost as though she could see the syllables float across the lobby toward him. The instant they struck like a harpoon between his shoulder blades, he spun around. His suddenly alert gaze slammed into her cascading hair and clung to it. Now there was hunger. Crazed, desperate hunger.

He leapt forward. But of course he didn’t reach her outstretched hand before the door closed. She had timed her words perfectly.

She stepped out of the elevator on the eighth floor, then slipped quietly into a corridor and then her room. Before long the sound of running feet passed outside the door she was leaning against. The desperate edge to the sound had to be her imagination, the thudding in her heart just adrenaline. With over three thousand rooms on The Oasis, there was no way he would find her.

Actively bringing her heartbeat under control, she pulled out her bag from the closet, gripping the rough black canvas with its red stitching so hard her fingers cramped. She hadn’t bothered to unpack. If she had her way, she was getting off the ship with Dr. Joshi in a few days, so why bother? Under her neatly folded clothes—black sweats, black jeans, black tanks—there was a zipper that opened the false bottom of the bag. She unzipped it and pulled out a glossy photograph of Joy and pressed it to her heart.

The memory of her baby boy’s smell wrapped around her, the sweetness of milk and Bournvita and baby soap all mixed in with his breath and his sweat and his drool. His Joy smell. From that first time they’d laid him on her breast in the hospital he’d grown and changed every day, but that smell of him, that had stayed exactly the same. It was her stamp on him and his on her.

Pressed against the photo, her scar prickled and tightened. The blasted thing had a life of its own and it refused to let her forget it was there. As if she needed a reminder. As if she could ever be the person she had been before she got it.

The sound of footsteps echoed outside her door again. She imagined Nikhil’s starved body racing up and down all the corridors on the ship and refused to acknowledge the squeezing in her chest it set off. She could open the door, let him in and tell him everything. But he’d never believe her. She needed him ready. Ripe, and desperate enough to suspend all that he held as true.

Amazingly enough, he had jumped down the rabbit hole rather more easily than she had expected.

You’re right, Jen, she thought, your Spikey does have reverse trust issues.

Thank heavens for small mercies. She wasn’t about to stare a gift horse in the mouth, given that gift horses weren’t a problem she’d ever had to deal with.

She gave the photograph one last look, filled her mind with her baby’s sweet smile, pulled out the only other thing she had stashed away in the false bottom of the bag, and settled in to read.

Nikhil slammed his fist against the number eight on the wall. He’d forgotten if he had covered the eighth floor already. He no longer knew where the hell he was or how long he’d been running up and down corridors. Or why his brain had waited two years before going kaput. The Jack had to have killed at least half his brain cells by now, but hearing that name, seeing that slide of bright red hair, he knew he wasn’t hallucinating. Then there was the aspirin next to his bed. Those little white pills were as real as shit got.

He made his way down the stairs. Groups of people milled around everywhere, dressed as though they were at a wedding. It had to be Formal Night again. He slipped past the crush of bodies, trying to block out the clawing mix of perfume and good cheer.

Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

It’s what Jen had said to him that first time she’d kissed him, and he’d told her he might die if she didn’t let him into her room and do it again. She’d leaned into him, pushed her lips into his ear, and said the words: Take two aspirin and call me in the morning, Dr. Joshi.

They’d left those words on notes for each other the next morning whenever they stayed up half the night making love. Which was, oh, all the damn time.

Being on mission with Doctors Without Borders was being in the middle of war, and sex in all its life-affirming glory was rampant. The perfect escape. Doctors and nurses and all the workers of the MSF did it like rabbits trying to inherit the earth by repopulating it.

Not him, though. Not until Jen had grabbed him outside her room in Kandahar after they’d ducked under tables and let their clinic be perforated by insurgent bullets and he’d found himself wrapped around the seven-year-old boy he’d been treating for a persistent cough. He’d walked her to her room, and she’d pushed herself against him and stuck her tongue in his mouth with such hunger he would never forget it as long as he lived.

After that . . . after that, his life had never gone back to the way it had been before, and it never would. They had been on the same mission only twice, and every moment they had off, which really was tiny snatches of time interspersed between sawing off limbs and digging out bullets, they had spent digging into each other. In the wretched hell of Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, what could be better than making love to your wife, than listening to her talk, rolling around in her incredible mind, drowning in her laughter, and soaking up her love-drenched moans as she came around you?

He slid his key card into his door and let himself into his room. No warm mirror-work bedspread, no quirky papier mâché eggs with colorful dots and swirls. No pictures made by children tacked on the walls. No matter how frugal, how filthy their surroundings, she had always made their home home.

The clock flashed eight o’clock. Not too early to start drinking. Usually, he’d go running at this time. But dead weights hung from his body. The kind of exhaustion he was feeling belonged to a ninety-year-old, with advanced tuberculosis.

He poured out a glass of Jack and took it to bed. Without removing his shoes he sank onto the mattress and cradled the drink in his lap. His lids grew heavy, but he couldn’t give in. The moment his eyes closed, it would all be over. The only way to avoid it was drinking until he was sick to his stomach. Only then did he have a prayer at avoiding the nightmares.

Look what you’ve done to yourself, Spikey.

He picked up the note from the nightstand.

She’d found him on the deck last night. She’d found him in the elevator today. She was looking for him. Insane and entirely implausible as the idea was, could his wife really be looking for him? He let the thought linger for a few seconds, sucking up the fake relief of it.

Someone was looking for him, all right, someone who had defiled Jen’s memory with that word and that hair. Someone who knew what had been so private between them. He’d been too drunk the first time and too lost in his darkness the second time.

For the first time in two years, he put the Jack down without taking a sip and dragged himself to the door. Sitting in his room wasn’t going to bring her to him a third time. He stepped out of his room dead sober. The next time she found him he’d be ready.

She had spent a week observing Jen’s husband, and he was as predictable as that social schedule they kept displaying all over the ship. Today’s Events! (Never terribly different from yesterday’s events!)

But suddenly, he seemed to have decided to shake things up because he hadn’t shown up on the upper deck yet. All she could do was wait. She pressed herself into the shadows that had hidden her weeklong surveillance.

It was no wonder why he picked this deck for his nightly slow-suicide-by-alcohol missions. It was deathly silent—the only silent bubble in this floating cloud of raucous noise, too high up and isolated for the crowds and too disruptively windy for the peace seekers, all five of them on the ship.

She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt tighter over Jen’s hair as it twisted and flipped around her head as if it knew what she was doing and wanted out. She knew the feeling only too well.

Soon enough it would be time to let it out. For now, she curbed it and stole its freedom and reached into the stillness it had taken her ten years of being a dancer to cultivate. Most people didn’t realize that dance was as much about the stillness between movement as it was about movement itself. It was about holding your body exactly the way it needed to be held to tell a story. Just like in life, it was the stillness that made all the motion meaningful.

Just as she had done every night that week, she relaxed her muscles one by one and readied herself for the wait. His hand wrapped around her waist before his breathing filled her ear. Fear roared to life in her chest and cut off her breath. His mouth pressed into the hood of her sweatshirt. “Who are you?”

Pain. There was so much pain in that voice. She leeched into it like a bloodsucker until the slamming in her heart calmed and her senses returned. There wasn’t a hint of alcohol on his breath today, and that helped her breathe again.

“Does it matter who I am?”

He spun her around and pushed her away. But he kept a handful of her sweatshirt in his fist, as if he was afraid she was going to disappear again.

She met his gaze. His eyes were the darkest brown, like sugar burned past caramelization and hardened to bitter. How had she thought they were empty? Anger and hatred warred with pain, and then there it was, what she needed most, the barest hint of incipient hope.

He pushed her hood back.

The red mass spilled around her face. He let her go so fast the strands licking her face might as well have been flames.

“Why are you doing this?” His voice was the sound of gravel crunching underfoot when you went in search of gravestones.

An unfamiliar urge to touch him pulled at her fingertips. She crushed it against the fabric of her sweatshirt, pulling it tighter around herself. It kept her from covering up her hair. She had to let him look. No matter the pain in his eyes, she had to let him look. What bled from him was not her concern. Bringing him to his senses, that was why she was here. That was all she needed to focus on.

“Jen needs to speak to you.”

He stumbled back. Dry rasps of breath pumped from his chest. “How do you know her name? How do you know what she called me?”

“She told me.”

His fingers went to his head and fought to grip something but came up empty. He had forgotten how short his hair was. Suddenly, his eyes were empty again, as if he couldn’t remember where he was. Who he was.

His fingers splayed helplessly across his skull. “My wife is dead.” The words p. . .