He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 174

Chapter 174

Zara’s POV

An idea was taking a root in my head immediately I left Alex’s ward.

The idea had not left me overnight.

What if Alex wakes up from coma with an Retrograde amnesia. Not able to remember everything, especially Maya.

I woke up at six and it was exactly where I had left it, sitting in the front of my mind….

What if Alex woke up differently.

What if there was a way to influence what he can remember or forget.

I lay in bed for forty minutes running it forward.

I was not naive about medicine.

I understood, from the reading I had done and from the conversation I had had with myself in the hospital corridor, that retrograde amnesia was not a switch. You could not engineer a specific gap. You could not tell a brain what to retain and what to release. The process was not available to anyone standing outside it.

But I was also not naive about influence.

Influence was not the same thing as engineering. Influence operated at the margins, in the spaces around the thing rather than on the thing itself. And the spaces around Alex’s recovery…. the conversations he would have when he woke, the information he would receive, the people who would be in the room when he was first building his picture of what had happened, those spaces were not closed.

Not yet

The question was whether anyone with medical knowledge could do something at the biological level.

The question was whether I needed to ask

I knew one of the doctors on Alex’s case.

Not from the hospital…. from before. A professional acquaintance, someone who had been at the periphery of a social group I had moved through during the Voss Maritime years, who had moved into private practice around the same time I had understood that my relationship with Alex was ending and had therefore not been someone I had maintained contact with.

He was still practising

I had looked him up at seven.

I sent a message asking whether he could spare fifteen minutes

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He replied within the hour. He assumed, correctly, that I wanted information about Alex’s condition.

I let him assume that.

His office was three floors below the ward…..

Private practice, the kind that existed in the hospital’s adjacent professional building…. patients by

appointment

He stood when I came in.

“Zara,” he said. “It’s been a long time”

“It has,” I said.

We sat…

He had the professional sympathy of someone who believed he understood why I was there…. former partner of the patient, concerned, seeking information through a channel that felt more personal than the nursing staff.

He was partly right

“How is he?” I said.

He walked me through it. The finger movement, the responsiveness indicators, the cautious optimism of the team. The timeline…. no certainty, never certainty in these situations, but the direction was positive.

I listened

Then I said: “Memory loss. After something like this. How common is it?”

He leaned back slightly

“It varies considerably,” he said. “Post-traumatic amnesia is well-documented. The range is wide…. some patients have very limited gaps, others have more significant ones. It’s rarely predictable.”

“The period immediately before the trauma,” I said. “I’ve read that’s often the most affected.”

“That can be the case,” he said. “The consolidation of recent memory is disrupted in ways that older, more established memory isn’t. Why are you asking?”

“I’m trying to understand what to expect when he wakes up,” I said.

He nodded….

He believed this.

I took a breath

“Is there anything that can be done,” I said, “to influence which memories consolidate and which don’t?”

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The room went still

He looked at me.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean…..” I kept my voice level

“In the recovery process. Whether there are interventions that might affect how the recent past is processed.”

He was looking at me now withm a different expression from the one he had walked in with.

“Zara,” he said.

“It’s a genuine question,” I said. “I’ve read that the environment after waking can influence…..”

“What are you actually asking me?” he said.

I held his gaze

Then I reached into my bag.

Placed the envelope on the table

He looked at it.

I watched him look at it….. the particular, still assessment of someone who had received something they had not expected and was determining what it meant.

He did not open it.

He pushed it back across the table toward me.

“No,” he said

“I’m not asking you to…..”

“I know what you’re asking,” he said. His voice had changed entirely…..

“And the answer is no. Not because it’s not possible to influence a recovering patient’s environment. Not because there aren’t unethical people who might entertain this conversation.” He held my gaze. “But because I’m not one of them. And because what you’re describing is not a grey area.”

“I’m not asking you to harm him…..”

“You’re asking me to participate in the manipulation of a patient’s recovery for personal reasons,” he said. “That is harm.” He stood. “I’d like you to leave.”

I picked up the envelope

Did not speak.

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Walked to the door.

“Zara.” His voice behind me.

I stopped….

“Don’t ask anyone else this question,” he said. “In this hospital or anywhere else. The moment you do, you are in a different kind of trouble from the kind you’re already in.”

I left.

The car park…

I sat behind the wheel with the envelope in my bag and the morning doing its ordinary thing outside the

windscreen.

He had said no without blinking

I had known this was the likely response.

I had asked anyway because not asking had felt like leaving a door unexamined.

The door was examined….

It was closed.

I sat with the closed door for several minutes

Then I began thinking differently.

The biological approach was closed. The direct route…. the intervention at the medical level, had no one available to take it and would not have.

But the biological route had never been the only route

Memory was not only what the brain retained or released.

Memory was also what people were told.

What they were shown

What they encountered in the first hours and days after waking, when the gaps were present and the narrative was still forming and the person doing the forming was relying heavily on external information

to fill what the internal record couldn’t.

If Alex woke with gaps…. and he might, the doctor had said as much without intending to, then those gaps would be filled by whoever was in the room.

By whatever he was shown

By whatever account of the recent past he received from the people around him.

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Maya would be in the room

Maya would provide the account.

But Maya could not be in the room every minute of every hour.

And the account Maya provided could be complicated…. not by engineering Alex’s memory, but by engineering what surrounded it when he was looking for something to hold onto.

Not manipulation of the biological process.

Manipulation of the information environment. 1

Which was something I understood considerably better than medicine.

I started the engine

The car park began moving past the windows as I pulled out toward the exit.

What Alex remembered was not available to me.

What Alex believed when he woke up….. that was a different question.

And belief was something that could be shaped by the right information, delivered by the right person, at the right moment.

I turned onto the main road.

Began driving.

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