"She's alive, Elliot. I need you to fly to Houston."

Ethan Sterling never called during business hours. That alone told Elliot something was wrong before he even registered the words.

He set down his campaign briefing file. He was ahead four points in the preliminary projections, the donor endorsements were falling into place, and everything was going exactly the way it was supposed to go. He picked up the receiver. "Talk."

"Houston General. ICU, but she's stable." Ethan's voice had the particular flatness of a man who had rehearsed this. "There was a car fire - head-on collision on Highway 59, three weeks ago. She was admitted as a Jane Doe. All her identification burned with the vehicle. Half her face is burned, left side, temple to jaw. Head trauma, pressure on the brain - the neuro team managed it, it's resolved. But the memory-" A pause. "Elliot. Full retrograde amnesia. She doesn't know her own name."

Three years. No contact, no trace. And now Houston General.

"You're certain it's her?"

"I've been treating her two weeks and I couldn't shake the feeling I recognized her. Then I looked up your wedding announcement." Ethan exhaled. "I need you to come identify her. I can't treat her properly as a Jane Doe."

Elliot was quiet for a moment. He thought about the manila envelope that had arrived three years ago - the divorce papers inside, and the small card in Iris's slanted handwriting that said only I'm sorry. He thought about how he had sat at this same desk with his pen uncapped, and he had not signed them.

He had told himself it was for the campaign. That a divorce, at that particular moment, would be a narrative his opponents would use against him. He had told himself that every week for three years, and mostly he believed it.

"I'll fly out tomorrow," he said.

She was smaller than he remembered.

Elliot stood in the doorway of Room 14 and looked at the woman in the bed and had that thought, which he immediately set aside as irrelevant. The bandages covered everything from her left temple to the curve of her chin - thick white wrappings that seemed too heavy for her neck. Her right eye was closed. Her right hand lay on top of the blanket.

He could see the scar along her index finger. She'd cut herself on a broken wine glass at their second anniversary dinner and bled through three cloth napkins and refused to go to the emergency room. He had been angry at her stubbornness, and she had been angry at him for being angry, and they had sat on opposite sides of the restaurant and not spoken for the rest of the meal.

He had still been angry in the car on the way home.

He registered this memory and did not attach any particular weight to it.

"It's her," he said.

Ethan nodded. He had the expression of a man who had been hoping for a different answer and wasn't getting one. "She's been conscious about a week. Lucid, responsive, neurologically intact. But the memory - nothing, Elliot. She doesn't know her own name. She makes a face every time we call her Jane, like the word doesn't fit, but she has nothing to replace it with."

Elliot walked to the foot of the bed. He stood there and looked at her and felt nothing that surprised him, which was exactly how he had planned to feel.

She had left their daughter, who had been four years old. She had left Oliver, who had been three months old. She had driven away and mailed divorce papers and written I'm sorry on a card the size of a playing card, as though that were sufficient accounting for five years of marriage and two children. He had not spent the past three years missing her. He had spent them managing what she had broken when she left, and there was nothing about her lying in this hospital bed that changed the mathematics of that.

"I want her face restored," he said. "Before the accident. Find whoever you need to find - cost isn't the issue."

Ethan studied him carefully. "And after the surgery?"

"Call me when she's ready to be discharged. Six weeks, eight - however long it takes. I'll come back for her." He picked up his coat from the visitor's chair. He had not sat down. He had been in the room for less than three minutes. "She'll be returning to Austin with me."

"Elliot." Ethan's voice dropped. "She doesn't know who you are. She doesn't know anything. Don't you want to stay, even for a few-"

"Call me when she's ready." He moved toward the door. "Don't tell her about the children. I'll explain everything when I come."

He walked out without looking at the bed again.

He was in the hospital for twenty-two minutes.

He told himself he felt nothing. He had a campaign to run. He had a life that had been functioning perfectly well for three years without her. Six weeks was not a long time.

He took a cab to the airport, and on the plane back to Austin he opened his briefing file and read through the donor schedules, and he did not think about the scar on her hand, or the sound his own footsteps had made in the corridor of Room 14, or the way the bandages had looked too heavy for her neck.

He was very nearly successful.