It was the whole of it, compressed into a single sensory instant, and it reached into him and turned him six years old and terrified.

And he had walked into it anyway, for a stranger, because a woman he had never met had said the four words that could still move him past his own fear: I don’t want to be alone. He knew what those words cost to say.

He had never managed to say them himself, in all his grief; he had swallowed them and sat alone with his terror because that was the kind of man he’d been raised to be.

And maybe that was part of why his legs carried him to the elevator despite everything — because someone had finally said out loud the thing he’d never let himself say, and it turned out that hearing it was its own kind of summons.

The woman in Room 608 looked about thirty-two, pale, hooked to a bank of IV lines, a soft scarf over most of her hair.

She turned her head when he came in and studied him with tired eyes.