Apparently the dental comparison, I later learned, had been incomplete and should never have been treated as conclusive.
I felt sick.
“Then who did we bury?”
“We don’t know yet,” Melissa said.
I leaned back.
My mind could hold only one impossible fact at a time.
“Where were you?”
Melissa looked at her hands.
“Different places.”
She had spent months in a regional hospital under an unidentified-patient designation.
Eventually she could speak again, but her memories came in fragments unrelated to each other.
A yellow kitchen.
A man carrying produce crates.
The smell of cinnamon.
A little girl laughing.
A name that sounded like Ava but disappeared whenever she tried to hold onto it.
She was moved into a long-term neurological program, then a supported residence.
Her physical recovery progressed faster than her memory.
“How did nobody find us?”
Dr. Foster’s expression carried the weary sadness of someone who had already asked the same question.
