She had built a career on her voice, and her voice was the one thing the crash had taken from her entirely.

So she learned to do the only thing the dark still allowed.

She learned to listen the way she had once learned to argue — as a discipline, a craft, a thing done with the whole of the attention.

She catalogued the nurses by the rhythm of their steps and the pressure of their hands.

She learned the schedule of the ward by its sounds.

She built a map of a world she could not see, and she waited inside it, patient as she had ever been in any courtroom, for the one voice that would give her a reason to fight her way back.