He knew the choreography of it in his body: the doctor’s approach, the careful face, the way the whole world narrows to the space between you and the news coming toward you.

Four years ago that walk had ended his life as he’d known it.

He had stood in a hallway just like this one and watched a doctor’s expression and understood, before a single word, that Adanna was going to die, and everything after had been the long work of surviving it.

And now here he was again, in the reprising nightmare, watching a doctor come down a hall with a report — except this time the doctor was smiling, this time the paper said rising, this time the walk ended not in a death but in a life given back.

He had spent four years unable to enter these buildings because they held only that one terrible memory.

And the illness that had brought him back into them, kicking, terrified, had now written a second memory over the first — the same hallway, the same walk, the opposite ending.