Eli placed The Secret Garden in her hands.
“You can start where I stopped.”
Laura sat down.
The first sentence took her almost a minute.
She read it anyway.
Lucy did not wake that week.
She did not wake the following month.
But after the pneumonia cleared, a new pattern emerged. Her left eyelid fluttered when Eli read. At first, nurses believed it was random. Then it happened during the same chapter on three consecutive afternoons.
Whitaker ordered additional testing.
The scans showed increased activity in regions associated with language and familiar sound. It was not consciousness as most people understood it. It was not a guarantee.
It was something.
Lucy entered her seventeenth month in the hospital.
By then, the Iron Lantern reading calendar had been replaced three times. Corners curled. Coffee stained the bottom. New names joined when old members became sick or left town.
Nobody missed a day.
