Through the doorway, Helen watched Rachel reading from his weathered notebook. Her voice moved through the room like a returning tide. Between them lay his old pencil and an open page. The brother and sister were finishing a story, the last fault between them finally closing.
Outside, twilight settled across the city like cooled lava. Helen stood for a moment beneath the hospital awning, the world quiet after months of tremors, alarms, and headlines. Some awakenings, she thought, return more than memory; they unearth unfinished truths and deliver them back to the people who never stopped listening.