It was closer to recognition.

It was the sound of a thing I had felt my whole life without being able to name finally showing me its face, and the face was my father’s, and it was alive.

Chapter 12 — Alive

The next hours were a blur of radio calls and paramedics and floodlights.

The tunnel led to a false wall beneath the neighboring property, and behind the false wall they found a man — alive, but barely, weighing almost nothing, carrying in his body the ruin of years no person should survive.

I was not allowed close.