The woman looked hard at Annie, and Annie too looked down at her own hands, her empty fingers bent around the pen that wasn’t there. There was mild surprise at this. Actually, more in the way of bemusement than surprise.

When she spoke again, the woman’s voice was different. Kinder. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’m going to come back in a little bit. I want to let you rest for a while more. And then we’ll call . . .” She looked down at the thing she was holding. A clipboard, it was. “We’ll call Mrs. McFarlane, to let her know to come and get you,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Annie said. “It’s Mr. McFarlane. It’s Graham. My husband. He’ll come and get me.” This was the first thing Annie knew, and she felt an amazing welling up of pure relief: she remembered now who she was. And it was going to be all right. Because Graham would come. He would take her home.

The woman was silent for a moment. “Well, we’ll figure it out,” she said. She was speaking to Annie as if to a child. “For now, you just rest.”

After the woman left, the light somehow grew dimmer in the alcove Annie seemed to be consigned to, so it wasn’t hard to obey the woman. She closed her eyes, and she slept.

When she woke, she remembered it all.

Who she was, where she was, everything that had happened to her—and she wished she were no one again, waiting for Graham.

She’d fallen. On the way home from her drink with Ian, she’d fallen. She’d been carrying the book, Ian’s book, in her left hand, so as she felt her feet leave the ground, she shot her right arm out, her free arm, to catch herself. But when the heel of her hand hit the ice, something in that arm gave way with a sharp, unforgiving pain, and then she was landing on her knees and her stomach. Her chin hit the icy sidewalk last, and her head was slammed upward—her head, which she’d been trying to hold up safely, out of danger, as she fell.

That was all of it, apparently.

She lay still for some moments on the ice, panting, feeling mostly relief—relief to be conscious, to be alive. Relief that it was over.

She became aware then of the pain, mostly in her arm, but also in her jaw, her chin. She ran her tongue over the inside of her upper lip and tasted blood, felt the dents her lower teeth had made in its surface as they were shoved upward into it.

When she rolled to the side to try to begin to stand, the astonishingly sharp pain in her arm stopped her.

She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t move.

But after a while—a minute maybe?—she tried again. This time she held her right arm pressed against her body with her left hand, held it as steadily as she could manage to while she lurched forward and up.

Her right knee was throbbing, burning, as she put her weight on it, as she stood, gingerly. “It’s okay,” she said aloud to herself. She didn’t recognize her own voice. “It’s okay. Just slowly, just slowly, just slowly, just slowly.”

She tried a few steps. The knee was not too bad, she could walk. But the arm—it was broken. It had to be broken.

She could feel the warm blood on her chin now, her mouth tasted of it. Her head ached too, but she thought she could make it home. She had to let the cat in. The real cat. Then she’d figure out what she needed to do.

Every step on the remaining long blocks made the pain jolt through her arm. When she turned the corner onto Prentiss Street, she felt such relief she could have cried.

From the foot of the driveway, she could see Sam waiting under the light by the front door. When he saw her, he yowled his outrage over and over. Annie fumbled with her left hand into her purse for her keys, and then fumbled again to turn the key in the lock. Her right arm dangled, useless. The pain, which she couldn’t have imagined could get worse, flashed with her slightest motion.

Inside, the idea of filling Sam’s dish seemed impossible. Instead, she squatted and reached under the sink with her left hand for some of his dried food and tossed it across the kitchen floor.

Then she sat at the big table for maybe five minutes—or maybe ten, she couldn’t have said. She let the tears rise and slide down her face—tears for the pain, for the terror of the moment of the fall, for her aloneness in all of this. When she’d finally calmed down, when she’d stopped crying, she went upstairs slowly and carefully, up to the landline telephone in Graham’s study. Pressing her arm against the desk there, she used her left hand to call herself a cab to take her to the hospital.

“What does the other guy look like?” the cabdriver said, staring at her in the rearview mirror as she gingerly lowered herself into the back seat.

She had to wait two days, drugged nearly the whole time and with her arm in a sling, for the swelling to go down, for the orthopedic surgeon to fit her into his schedule. She watched television hour after hour, repeatedly nodding off and then waking to check the time, to see if she could take another oxycodone yet. On the third day, she came in for the surgery that would pin the pieces of her arm together.

In the car on the way home, she said to Frieda, “I forgot he was dead. Graham.”

Frieda looked quickly over at her. “What do you mean?”

“I had some confusion, I guess. There are initials—P, O . . . postoperative . . . something or other.” This is what the doctor had told her when he finally came by. It happened “not infrequently,” he said, to the elderly after anesthesia—this confusion. He had warned her that she might have other episodes of it for a month or two, but said that it was a good sign that she’d recovered so quickly from this one, and that it was so minimal.

“Oh, yes,” Frieda said now. She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t remember the name either. It sounds like PTSD or something, but that’s not it. Anyway, the doctor did tell me about it.” She looked at Annie quickly. “You’re not supposed to worry.”

“I know,” Annie said. After a moment had passed, she said, “I thought he was the one who would be coming to take me home—Graham—and I was so glad.”

“Well, of course you were.” Frieda reached over and touched Annie’s arm.

After a minute, Annie said, “No. It was different from that. It was . . . more important than that.”

She didn’t know how to explain it to Frieda. Her gladness. It wasn’t just that Graham was alive again. It was that she was too. I loved him again, she wanted to say. I remembered that I loved him.

Frieda stayed and had dinner with Annie. She’d brought over a soup she’d made, split pea with ham and dill in it, and she’d bought a loaf of dark rye bread at Formaggio to go with it.

While they ate, they talked about Annie’s fall, about other family accidents. Lucas falling off a climbing structure in second grade and breaking his arm. Graham breaking his ankle trying to slide into third base at a bookstore game on the Common.

This was on account of Graham too, Annie felt—this ordinary, easy exchange with Frieda. The way he’d come back to her had made this possible.

Frieda had never broken anything. “Except, I suppose, my heart a few times.”

“Oh well,” Annie said. “We’ve all done that.”

Frieda seemed to be waiting for her to go on, to discuss her broken heart.

Instead Annie talked about the night of her accident, the reading by Lucas’s writer, Ian. Her quick drink with him afterward. She didn’t mention his mistake, or her sense of shock, of humiliation. Or the relief, afterward, of escaping him. She told Frieda that she’d bought his book, but dropped it when she fell, something she hadn’t realized until later. “So it’s lying out there in the snow somewhere, I suppose.”

“Oh, I can easily get you another,” Frieda said.

She looked at Frieda, generous Frieda, her old friend. Her hair was even messier than usual, from the winter hat she’d been wearing. When they were leaving the recovery area, the nurse had said to them, “Are you guys sisters?” They must have looked puzzled, because she said, “Just, you know, you’ve got the same name.” They looked at each other then, the tall Mrs. McFarlane, the short one, and they both laughed.

“No,” Frieda had said. “No, but we might as well be.”

Now Annie said to Frieda, “That’s okay. I’ve got plenty to read.”

Annie woke in the night. She’d been dreaming of Graham—so he’d come back to her in this way too.

She got up. Sam followed her into the bathroom, where he sat by the door watching her while she took some ibuprofen under the too-bright light, while she used the toilet. When she came out into the dark hall and turned toward her room again, he ran ahead of her and sprang onto the bed. She could hear his tail thumping slowly on the quilt as he waited for her.