He had carried her supposed ashes.

He had watched his wife die of missing her.

And here she was, breathing, flinching in a corner, close enough to touch — and the impossibility of it, the sheer against-all-reason fact of her being alive, was almost harder to withstand than her death had been.

Death, at least, is a thing the mind knows how to hold.

This — a daughter returned from six years of a false grave — was outside anything he had a way to feel.

He said her name, and it came out broken, and it was the truest thing he had said in six years, because for six years he had not been able to say her name to her face, and now he could, and the saying of it was a whole grief and a whole homecoming at once.