“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Sander said as Chey dabbed an antiseptic cloth over the wounds on his back. He was straddling a chair in the empty parlor, shirt removed to expose the various cuts and abrasions he had acquired during the explosion.

“Yes, I do. Some of these are pretty bad. Like this one.” She saturated the cloth from a bottle in her other hand and pressed it against a particularly deep laceration.

Sander bit back a hiss. “I don’t think you got it deep enough.”

She laughed at his sarcasm, a sound that was a balm to his soul.

“I can go deeper,” she said, sassing him back.

“Hey, that’s usually my line,” he quipped.

Chey guffawed; he smiled. Despite the dire circumstances of the last few days, he found it comforting to fall into effortless banter with his wife. He knew this private time soothed her, too, even though she’d shown no outward signs of strife. Inwardly they were both still dealing with their own demons.

He hunched his shoulders forward to tighten his skin when she began applying wound closure strips over the worst of the cuts.

“How does that feel?” she asked.

“Good. Better than it did. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Almost done.” She applied a final strip low on his back.

Once she’d stepped away from the chair, he pushed up and swung a leg over the seat, rising to full height. He didn’t bother to put a new shirt on. Chey had seen him covered in bruises before.

“How are you holding up?” he asked as she began cleaning up the cloths, bandages, and other medical paraphernalia.

“As well as can be expected. We have you two back and safe. That’s a big worry off my mind.” She glanced up and smiled.

Sander tried to detect leftover fear or anxiety or exhaustion, but found none. She was as resilient as ever, as strong as the day he’d married her.

“We should be able to round up the few men left in this coup attempt pretty quick, which means I can turn my attention back to Elias and his problem. He was saying at the cabin before the attack that he thought memories might be trying to surface.”

“Really? That’s great news.” Chey abandoned her task. Hope glittered in her eyes as she faced him. “Did he mention something specific?”

“Only that things were starting to seem familiar, or that he felt he should remember something.” Sander cupped his hand along the side of Chey’s throat and stroked her pulse with his thumb. “I think we should keep doing what we’ve been doing. The meals, the outings, anything and everything that he used to do.”

“I’m willing to do anything. I was worried when he left the parlor so suddenly earlier, but I guess he has to cope with all this at his own pace,” Chey said.

“I wanted to go after him,” Sander confessed. “But like you, I realized he probably needs time and space after such chaos. Time to settle himself.”

A hinge creaked as the door opened. Whoever had left the parlor last—Jeremiah or Emily, Sander thought—hadn’t closed the latch properly.

Elias stepped in and paused, as if frozen by the sight of him and Chey.

“You all right?” Sander asked, concerned by his son’s suddenly white face and wide eyes.

“I came to tell you . . . I wanted to . . . wait. Don’t move.”

Sander dropped his hand from Chey’s throat and took a step toward Elias. The halting speech alarmed him. Everything about Elias’s reaction alarmed him. But the request, don’t move, halted him in his tracks. Chey, who had also turned to take a step in Elias’s direction, went still at his side.

“What is it?” Chey asked.

“It’s the déjà vu again. I’ve seen this before,” Elias said with a gesture their way. “If I can just hold onto it, I think I might be able to remember.”

The tableau of Sander standing in front of Chey, both staring into each other’s eyes, hit Elias so hard that he was momentarily dizzy with it. He was afraid to move lest it shatter the sense of familiarity. He felt as if he’d stood there a hundred times before, in the exact same place, looking at the exact same scene.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Sander asked in a cautious voice.

Elias quietly closed the door behind him. And just like that, the spell ended. As if the click of the latch had somehow snapped the memory thread.

He wanted to shout with frustration.

“It’s gone,” he said as he crossed the parlor to the fireplace. Elias skimmed the family pictures lined up on the mantel but turned away, too annoyed at the sensation of coming so close to remembering only to have it ripped from his grasp. Was this how his entire life would be? Not quite remembering all that had come before? He didn’t think he could live on the precipice and stay sane.

“This keeps happening, Elias. It’s a good sign, I think. It has to be. You’re close to getting your memory back,” Sander said somewhere behind him.

“That’s how it seems every time it happens—and then nothing comes. I go back to being fuzzy and vague.” Elias paused near the window and stared out at the forest in the distance. Bitterness had him tight in its grip. Even the brightness of a new day could not pull him from his darkening mood.

A shadow coalesced in the pane of glass. From shadow to the shape of a man, blond hair loose around a chiseled face. As Sander drew closer, Elias picked out more detail.

Sander’s intense blue eyes.

His forehead.

The slope of his nose.

A strong, angled jaw.

And then a proverbial dam let loose.

Memories flooded in from all times in his life: childhood, teens, young adult. Like the flip of a movie reel, Elias saw Christmas celebrations, birthday cakes, canoes, hunting trips, dungeons, galas, thrones, uniforms. The crushing weight of an entire life descended with merciless precision. Dizziness swarmed him as the onslaught continued.

Him and Sander at the edge of a river, fishing. Chey behind the lens of a camera. Secretive missions in far-off palaces. Castles. Royals. Dungeons. Friends. Sisters. His brother.

His mother. Father.

Inari.

Elias turned from the window. Sander stood perhaps five feet away, a bemused look on his face.

Even that he remembered.

Elias suffered through a strange transition from the unknown into a life he remembered that he loved and cherished. That he belonged to people he loved and cherished.

He stepped forward with a gust of relieved, emotional laughter and embraced Sander with his good arm.

“I remember, Pop. I remember.”