The memory came back to Dean in pieces.
Not all at once.
Not cleanly.
It came the way a nightmare sometimes returned after waking—first as a feeling, then a sound, then a place that seemed familiar for reasons he couldn't explain.
For days, there had been nothing.
No memory of the day he disappeared.
No memory of the days before it.
Only the fact everyone had told him.
You died.
You were seventeen.
There had been a funeral.
There had been grief.
There had been years of silence.
And somehow, impossibly, he was standing in Bailey Falls again.
Alive.
But there had always been something buried beneath that simple fact.
Something his mind had refused to touch.
Something that had been waiting.
And now, sitting quietly in the room that had once belonged to him, Dean remembered.
He had come home from school tired.
Not exhausted.
Just tired enough that the straps of his backpack had begun to feel heavier than they should.
