What she has, instead of the memory, is the fact of being alive.

And the fact of being alive, after everything that happened on December 20, 1980, is not a small thing.

The body that froze on the porch step came back.

The person it contained — young, healthy, on her way home from a Saturday night out — came back too.

And the life that followed, with all its ordinary complexity and its ordinary continuation, is the evidence that the program ran long enough, that the margin held, that the medicine worked.

She is warm now.