At 3:17 in the morning the police rang to tell me my husband had been killed in a crash, while he was asleep beside me with one leg over mine. The officer said: leave the room without waking the man next to you.

“They can take everything I own,” Cassian said. “That doesn’t make the d.e.a.d man me.”

The doctor said the face was not identifiable.

Then he read the rest of it off a sheet.

Male, approximately thirty-two. Six feet one. Blood type A positive. An old surgical scar low on the right abdomen consistent with an appendectomy.

Cassian is thirty-two. He is six feet one. He is A positive.

He had his appendix out in 2020.

He lifted his shirt in that room and the scar was exactly where the doctor had said.

In the lift on the way back up to our floor at about half five he took my face in both hands.

“Anouk. Look at me. It’s me.”