When I finished, she was quiet for a while.
"The trooper found you by your coat, though," she said. "That's what his report says. 'Female in a long tan coat.' It was the only thing he had. Your coat was the only reason anybody could find you at all."
I hadn't thought of it that way.
"Are you going to marry him?" I asked, after a while, because it seemed she wanted me to.
She took her left hand out of her pocket. There was no ring on it. Then she took her right hand out, and opened it, and the ring was lying in her palm, the round stone set high, catching the sun. She'd been holding it, I think, the whole time.
"I don't know," she said. "He sat with me in the hospital every day for two weeks. He learned how to change the dressing on my shoulder. He drives me everywhere on surface streets and never once complains it takes forty minutes. That was all real. And he let me think I was losing my mind, and he did it for a year and a half, to keep me. That's real too." She closed her fingers over the ring. "I don't know what you do with a person who's half true. Maybe everybody is. Maybe that's just what a person is. I don't know yet." She put her hand back in her pocket. "I'm going to find out, though. I'm not going to let anybody tell me what I remember anymore. Including him. Including you."
"Good," I said.