No one comes back all at once from a thing like that.

He spent weeks in the hospital, and then months in a care facility, and the doctors used words like malnutrition and muscle atrophy and it will take time, and it did take time.

But he came back.

I sat with him every day I could, and slowly the hollowed stranger on the stretcher filled back in, a little, into the father I remembered — the gentle voice, the way he listened as though what you said mattered, the warmth my mother’s house had never had and that I understood now had been him, only ever him, all along.

Chapter 20 — What He Knew

He told me, in pieces, across those months, only as much as he wanted me to carry.