The sounds of the house came to her distantly, muffled by water and walls, softened by the steam. Somewhere below, her boys. Somewhere below, the man who was her husband was moving through the rooms of a house that was somehow, impossibly, home.
She lay in the warm water and breathed.
And for the first time in three years, for the first time since a shore and a darkness and a life that had been interrupted mid-sentence, Ruby was still.
Not the stillness of unconsciousness. Not the stillness of someone held in place by confusion or fear or the fog that had been her constant weather since the accident.
The stillness of someone who has, against considerable odds, arrived.
She didn't have everything back yet. The memories were still there on the other side of the fog, still just out of reach, still refusing to come fully into focus no matter how hard she reached.
