“Your other aunties live in Phoenix now,” Mary explained as she toddled about the bed tucking in the corners of Shannon’s clean bed sheet. “They’ll come as soon as they can and stay at my house for awhile.”

“Lora and Lonna,” she piped up triumphantly.

“Yes! They both squealed like children on Christmas morning when they heard the news. We’re so happy to have you back with us, Shannie.”

She wished she could say she felt the same, but she hadn’t quite been able to work around to that yet. Instead, she pushed the corners of her mouth up into a smile and tried to ignite it with her eyes. Mary’s expression told her she hadn’t reached the end zone with the effort.

“I know,” Mary said, and she took Shannon’s hand between both of hers as she thumped down on the side of the bed. Patting it noisily, she continued. “You can’t expect to be acclimated to all of this yet, dearie. You’ve had quite a shock.”

Her aunt’s sweetness propelled an emotional reaction, and tears crested in Shannon’s eyes until she couldn’t see much more than the blurred round shape of the woman sitting beside her.

“You go right ahead and cry. Don’t you think twice about it either. Do you remember what Grandma Malone used to say about crying?” She didn’t wait for Shannon’s reply, but she had to admit she didn’t remember her grandmother, much less her views on shedding a few tears. “She said crying is our way of letting out the steam before the whole cooker explodes and you have rice all over the ceiling.”

Shannon snickered. And the more thought she gave to it, the funnier it seemed. Finally, she snorted and began to belly laugh.

Grabbing her stomach with both arms, Shannon groaned. “Oh! Why does that hurt? Why does laughing hurt?”

Mary looked at her with round, innocent eyes. “Maybe because you haven’t done it in ten years. It’s probably like that walk we took on Auntie Lonna’s ranch. Do you remember?”

Shannon shook her head. “I wish I did.”

“Lonna let the chickens get out, and you pitched in to help us round them up before her husband Cecil found out. You and I had to go clear across the pasture before we got that last one. I could hardly get out of bed the next morning. My rubber legs buckled right underneath me the minute my feet hit the floor and I tried to stand up. I hadn’t had that much exercise in a month of Sundays.” She squeezed Shannon’s hand. “You don’t remember that? We joked about it for years afterward. You called me Aunt Gumby.”

“Sorry. I don’t.”

Mary patted her hand and gave her a loving smile. “No matter. It will all come back to you, just like you’ve come back to us, Shannie. You just let your brain wake up in its own time. Nobody ever has a rosy day when they’ve been roused from bed with a bucket of ice water. A nice banana bread baking in the oven, some tea steeping in the pot, a little warm walnut butter. That’s how we’ll greet your brain now. Slow and easy.”

Shannon giggled. “You know what I do remember, Aunt Mary?”

“What’s that, child?”

“I remember how much I love you.”

Tears sprang to Mary’s eyes. “That’s a good start, dearie. That’s a very good start.”

Dr. Petros had arranged for one of the Austin-Bryant psychiatrists with whom the Draper staff collaborated to come and meet with Shannon in her hospital room. She’d gone into it carrying a backpack of very high hopes strapped to her back, but she felt like one good bump in the road might shake the bag free.

“That’s it?” she asked Dr. Benedict when she ended the session with a placating smile.

“I think we’ve done very well for our first time.”

“Are you serious?”

The doctor wore her brownish hair in a tight bun at the back of her head, and she brushed away a wisp that had escaped. With her hazel eyes fixed on Shannon through her black cat glasses, she added, “You need to have a little patience with yourself. You’ve been Missing in Action for a very long time. You’ll catch up to yourself. Just give it some time.”

“Dr. Benedict, time has already proven that it is not my friend. I can remember Edmund, but I can’t remember his touch. I know I studied graphics, but I can’t remember a single detail about it. How am I supposed to figure out the canvas of my life now when I can’t bring along a single brush stroke of my life then?”

The doctor sighed. “You’re just a little out of sync. But I’d say that’s a small price to pay when you weigh it against the fact that you’re alive. You’ve come back to life, Shannon. Against all the odds.”

Back to life. The words taunted her. Back to what life?

“I’ll see you again in a few days,” Dr. Benedict said as she gathered her things. When she reached the doorway, she turned around and smiled. “This was a good beginning, Shannon. We’ll get there.”

She didn’t have it in her to feign encouragement, so she simply nodded and willed the doctor to leave. Moments after she disappeared into the corridor, Shannon heard the exchange of whispers. She leaned forward in the hope of detecting the origin, and she jerked backward into a mock-casual lounging position as Dr. Petros turned the corner into her room.

“So how did it go with Dr. Benedict?” he asked her.

“Good beginning,” she replied.

“Really?”

“That’s the word on the street.”

Daniel chuckled as he pulled a penlight out of the pocket of his white lab coat. “Look at the wall behind me,” he instructed, shining the light at one eye and then the other. “Follow my finger.” When he’d finished, he poked the penlight back into his pocket. “Any headaches, blurry vision, discomfort?”

“I’m a little blurry late in the day, but it’s not too bad. Discomfort—well, that’s another thing.”

“Pain?”

“Extreme,” she snapped.

“Can you describe it?”

“I think so. It’s my brain. It throbs, all the time. This pounding kind of throb with an out-of-beat kind of rhythm.”

“Your brain.”

“Yes.”

He crossed his arms across his chest and shifted his weight to one side. “Expound, please.”

“Expound,” she repeated bitterly. “Okay, Doc. How’s this for expounding? I want to go home so much that it aches, and yet I can’t remember the home I’ll be going to. You and Dr. Benedict and Nurse Angela are all very nice, but you—” She had been about to tell him she didn’t like him, but that wasn’t exactly true.

“I don’t want to depend on you. And I resent you because I know when I do leave this place, I’ll remember everything about you. But my husband, my family, whatever friends I might have left? Not so much.”

Daniel sighed. “I’m sorry, Shannon.”

“Sorry enough to grant my parole?”

“No,” he stated. “Not sorry enough to do that.”

She turned away from him and sighed, but it manifested as more of a hiss.

“But what I can do is try to make us more palatable while you are here.” He picked up a brown leather case from the chair by the door and opened it as he crossed back to her. “Your aunt said you asked her to bring you some books to read.”

“Is that not allowed? I figured if I could have all those movies and—”

“No,” he interrupted, “of course it’s allowed. I want you to be comfortable while you’re here. I just thought this might be easier than having your aunt toting books back and forth.”

He handed her a small leather case, and Shannon opened it and stared down at the gray screen inside it.

“What is it?”

“It’s a Kindle.”

“What’s a Kindle?”

He considered a moment, then pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down.

“There are several different types of electronic devices now that act like a book. A Kindle is one of them.”

“Oh.” She stared down at it without blinking. “What book is it?”

Was it her imagination, or did he just snicker?

“The Kindle acts like a sort of computer,” he explained, and he reached through the bedrail and flicked the button at the bottom of the contraption. “It stores a lot of books. This is the one I used before I got my Android tablet—which is another type of computer—so it’s got a couple hundred on it. But if you want some more up-to-date reading material, we can restock it for you.”

Shannon was thinking fast. The idea of different types of computers rang a bell. The difference may have been important to her before—something to do with her work?

“There were really only two kinds of computers before—right? Are there more now?”

“Not exactly. There are still two major types, but there are more products now, and these e-readers—that’s another name for the Kindle—are one example. Here. Take a look at this.”

With a few strokes, he did some magic on the Kindle that brought a long list to the screen.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Koontz …

“All these books are in here?” she asked, lifting it and turning it over curiously.

“Yep.”

Patterson, LaHaye, Peretti …

The next line stopped her in her tracks. “Ooh! Nicholas Sparks. I like him.”

“Yeah, I think there’s a couple of his on there.”

“Wait. You read Nicholas Sparks?”

“I read everyone. I’m pretty voracious. For you, it’s classic TV. For me, it’s books.”

“Well, you knew a thing or two about The Dick Van Dyke Show, as I recall.”

His smile ignited sparks in his dark eyes as he looked at her. “I have you to blame for that,” he said. “We all changed the DVDs for you. I used to take a break and watch an episode in here now and then after visiting hours.”

Shannon tried to picture Dr. Petros’s six-foot frame curled up in the recliner while she “slept.” Did he muffle his laughter over the antics of the silly old characters? Did she ever stir while he was there? She suddenly felt vulnerable. But looking up at her doctor, she realized that she felt safe with him. The Draper staff and Aunt Mary seemed to respect him. Even Edmund had liked him, apparently. It occurred to her that the two men had watched over her together. She deliberately turned from the oddly unsettling thought.

“Tell the truth,” she teased. “You hoped I wouldn’t wake up so you could keep this as your personal TV room, right?”

He laughed, then grew serious. “At the cost of you not coming back to the people who love you? No. Not for one minute.”

“Did you watch other things too, or did you stick to the A-List?”

“I watched a movie here and there, too.”

“What was the last one?”

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

“You hummed along with ‘Moon River,’ didn’t you?” she asked, and then realized she’d remembered that with no trouble at all. “Did you like it?”

“The movie, not really. But I happen to think Audrey Hepburn was possibly the most enchanting actress of her generation.” Shannon’s astonishment must have shown on her face because he chuckled and added, “What can I say? I’m a renaissance man.”

Shannon’s eyes fluttered open, her heart pounding a mile a minute.

“You were dreaming,” Mary said softly from the recliner, and Shannon blinked several times until her aunt came clear.

“I was tumbling down a mountain of glittery walnuts. And Edmund didn’t have any thumbs.” The second it came out of her mouth, Shannon giggled. “Oh, you know what? That’s an episode of Dick Van Dyke.”

“You remembered. That’s progress, isn’t it?”

“I think it is,” she decided, and she noticed the large square of fabric perched on her aunt’s ample lap. “What are you working on?”

Mary set a blue quilted bag on the floor next to her and groaned slightly as she pushed up from the chair. Standing over the bed, she smoothed the cloth over Shannon’s blanketed thigh.

“I thought it might make a nice housewarming gift when you get to go home. We can hang it together.”

Shannon inspected the cross-stitch sampler before her: a beautiful fruit tree with its branches stretched toward a bright blue sky, the words of a Scripture verse forming several of the branches. “For I know the plans I have for you,” she softly read. “They are plans for good … to give you a future and a hope.”

Tears stung her eyes, and Shannon tilted her head and smiled at her aunt. “Jeremiah.”

“You remembered.” She touched her hands together in silent applause.

Shannon realized then that she instinctively resisted memories of God or His Word—or anything about Him, really. Somehow she knew that thoughts of Him used to provide the comfort of a cozy old quilt. To her raw heart, the feeling was now more like the scrape of sandpaper. But she did not want to share that with Mary.

“I guess there’s some stuff still in there,” she said, tapping the side of her head. “A little scrunched up, but still there.”

“Chapter twenty-nine, verse eleven,” Mary said. “It’s a promise. And the Lord always keeps His promises.”

A future and a hope sounded pretty good to Shannon just then. The promise might have held more weight, however, had it come from a God she could trust to not do her in when she least expected it.

“I moved your little computer screen over to the table,” Aunt Mary informed her. “When I came in, you’d dropped it to your chest and fallen fast asleep.”

“Oh, right.” Her head ached just a little as she recalled reading a James Patterson novel late into the night. “Dr. Petros brought it to me. It’s called a Kindle, and it stores, like, a thousand books!” She hesitated, realizing how easily time had gone on without her. “Do you know about Kindles?”

“Well, I’ve heard of them. I don’t have one, I’m afraid. Real books are good enough for me. I know that doctor of yours tried to spare me from lugging books back and forth, but I brought a couple for you anyway,” she said, producing Jane Austen’s Persuasion and one called The Help from the quilted bag on the floor. “I remembered how much you loved this one by Miss Jane Austen, and I had it on my shelf. And this other is a fun Southern read. They made a movie out of it. I’ll just leave them here on the table.”

“Thanks, Aunt Gumby.”

Mary’s face knotted up with joy. “You remembered! I knew you would.”

The old nickname had come out without a moment’s thought behind it, and Shannon wondered if perhaps all of her memories might come back in that way; in little sputtering droplets, all on their own.

“Oooh, and I spoke with your other aunties this morning,” she said, shifting gears as she sat down again. “They should be standing right here in front of you before the day is out.”

Lora and Lonna. Lora and Lonna. Lora and Lonna.

“Do you remember your aunties?”

“Lora and Lonna,” she stated with confidence.

“Very good.” Mary didn’t look at her as she spoke; she simply slid the needle out of the fabric and concentrated on the sampler before her. “And if you have any trouble figuring out which one is which, you just watch me. I’ll give you a little sign.”

Shannon didn’t pay much attention to the click of heels heading down the corridor until they shuffled to a stop and she glanced up at the young African American woman standing in the doorway.

Clamping her hand over her mouth, the woman gasped as their eyes met. Her fingers muffled her exclamation. “Shannon.”

Short, glossy corkscrew curls surrounding a fresh, radiant face … a long, slender neck … dark caramel skin …

A rushing river of memories swept Shannon away as her heartbeat pumped hard against her chest and her palms turned clammy. She had heard that voice before. “My mama was the product of Mississippi slaves, and Popi’s family migrated from Ecuador. Mama says she’s the tired and Popi is the poor, and we seven kids are the huddled masses, making us a real American family.”

“Izzy?”

Mary leapt up from her chair in a burst of pure enthusiasm. Grinning from ear to ear, she clapped her hands in swift little smacks and sang out, “Yippee!”

Shannon wondered if her aunt intended to celebrate like that every time a new memory from her past surfaced. She expected the confetti and party hats at any moment. But she felt encouraged.

“Shannon,” Izzy breathed as she cautiously approached her. “I can’t believe it. You’re awake.”

Shannon smiled at her longtime friend as Izzy took her hand and clutched it to her heart.

“Shannon, you don’t look so different. Except for the fact that there’s so much less of you, it’s like you just woke up from a nap! Not like you’ve been …” Izzy closed her eyes and shook her head. When she opened them again, she grinned at Mary. “Can you believe she came back to us after all this time?”

Shannon eased her hand away and opened her arms. Izzy heaved a huge sigh as she sort of fell into them. After a moment, she wrapped her arms tightly around Shannon, yanking her against her body.

Shannon didn’t realize Izzy had begun to cry until her slender torso trembled—and then rocked—within her embrace. “I’ve missed you so much,” she whispered. “Thank you, Jesus.”

Flashes of their friendship played across the movie screen of Shannon’s muddled mind in bright, colorful scenes.

Sitting on the floor of their dorm room, surrounded by half-eaten bags of Doritos and Oreos, discarded bottles of Coke, and piles of open books as they quizzed one another for the upcoming psych exam … The two of them huddled up from the rainstorm in Izzy’s “poo brown” Corolla with the sagging vinyl roof, sharing a bag of Twizzlers as Shannon filled her in on the new boy she’d met in the student union elevator that afternoon. Three hours with Edmund Ridgeway, and Shannon just knew that life as she’d known it had been abruptly altered … Izzy, clutching a bouquet of flowers, dressed in her beautiful lavender gown, ready to walk down the aisle and take her place next to Shannon as her maid of honor.

“I’m so sorry about Edmund,” Izzy said as she released her, and Shannon snapped back to the moment. “Are you—how are you?”

She lifted one shoulder in a shrug and tried to smile. “I don’t know yet.”

Izzy pushed a chair to her bedside and sat down, resting her hand over Shannon’s. “Stupid question,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Shannon swallowed around the dry lump in her throat. “Tell me about you.”

“Oh. Well, I’m married,” she said, and she seemed to stumble over the word.

Shannon felt a pang. I am too, she wanted to say. Instead, she smiled. “Richard?”

“No. Richard and I split up a few months after your accident.”

“Oh, wow.” Her best friend had a husband now, and she probably had no idea who he was. Taking a deep breath, she asked, “So who’s the lucky guy?”

“His name is Luca Rojas. He came to work at the PR firm.” She hesistated. “Do you remember my job?”

Shannon nodded. “Sort of. You started right after we graduated?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Izzy smiled in relief.

“Do you still work there?”

“We both still work there.”

“Luca.”

“Yeah. He’s from Ecuador,” Izzy beamed, and she giggled. “Can you believe I did the one thing Mama always told me not to do? I married an Ecuadorian like my Popi.”

Shannon tried it on for size. “Isabelita Larrea Rojas.”

Mary softly clapped her hands again from the chair in the corner. “Yippee,” she whispered, and Shannon laughed out loud.

“She does that every time I remember something.”

“And … we have three boys,” Izzy said, and she held up a photo on a small handheld screen. Three happy, similar faces beamed back at her. “Nicolas is seven, Alberto is five, and Luis—our youngest—is three now.” She began swiping her index finger across the screen, showing Shannon picture after picture of her happy family.

When she landed on the final one, she sighed. “And this is Luca.”

No wonder Izzy had nearly swooned at the mere name. Luca Rojas looked a little bit like a Latin American model with his cropped dark hair, chiseled features and the fringe of dark lashes surrounding chocolate brown eyes.

“Whoa,” Shannon said. “Nice going, Iz.”

The two of them shared a chuckle before Shannon took the photo contraption from Izzy’s hand and turned it over in her palm. “What is this, anyway?” Dropping her new terminology, she asked, “Is this your Kindle or something?”

As it sank in, Izzy’s face contorted in slow motion. “You’ve never even seen a smartphone, have you?”

Shannon shook her head. “My phone takes pictures, but—” She broke off and took a breath. “Oh. I probably don’t have that anymore.”

“Probably not.”

“That’s cool how pictures scroll to the side that way.”

“Swipe,” Izzy said. “It’s called swiping.”

Her temple throbbed slightly. Izzy had a smartphone, and a husband—and kids. Three of them! Shannon shook her head vigorously. “It’s a whole new world for me, Iz. I’ve missed so much.” She looked down at Izzy’s phone again and added, “I want one of these. Would you teach me how to use it?”

Izzy chuckled. “How about we get you up and walking around before we dive into the advancements in technology?”

“The lessons have already begun, Iz. Check this out!” she exclaimed, grabbing Dr. Petros’s Kindle from the rolling table next to the bed. “This thing holds hundreds of books. Do you have one?”

“I did,” she said with a grin. “When they first came out, like a hundred years ago, Rip Van Winkle. Now I read on my iPad.”

“Your—?”

“iPad. We’ll get to that.”

Shannon sighed and fell back into the pillows behind her as she raised the bed with the remote control. “I feel like an alien.”

“Well, some things never change,” Izzy teased. “You’ve been a little alien-like ever since I’ve known you. Remember that costume you wore for the Halloween party at Pi Kappa?”

The memory bounded to earth. “Sexy space traveler!” she exclaimed.

In the corner of the room, Mary burst into subdued applause and another, “Yippee!”