Back on the bench, Owen began talking. Nine years ago, he said, he had been twenty-seven years old, and he had been dying. A congenital defect, diagnosed at nineteen, managed through his early twenties, then cascading into something unmanageable. The doctors had given him three weeks, which he had spent making lists of things left undone.
Then something happened. He said only that he hadn’t died. That he had woken up after a long period of unconsciousness in a different condition than he had been in before. He had spent the years that followed not asking questions, not looking backward. The questions came later, after his father died.