The room was very quiet.
"She had your eyes," he said. "Gray. When you looked up from the hospital bed and said hello, I forgot how to speak. That was the real reason, not the bag of tests or the paperwork. I'd spent three hundred years knowing she was gone. And then you looked at me like a stranger."
Kate had put one hand flat against her sternum. Her breathing had changed.
"I want to say something," she said, and her voice came out thin.
"And I need you to not interrupt me until I've finished."
"Alright."
"I've been trying to explain to myself since the day you came into that room why I felt what I felt. The calm. The sense that I already knew you. I told Martha it was recognition. I told myself it was an origin energy resonance, a trick of the mind, or anything that had a name."
She drew a breath.
"I've been a very practical person my whole life. I do not believe in things I can't measure. And I have felt, every day for weeks, like a part of me was waiting by a door."
