The Ugly Luna He Never Saw novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Marquette

The room in Marquette had a paper-covered exam bed and a poster of the brain.

The window looked out at a parking lot full of snow.

Niko sat on the bed with his hands between his knees.

The neurologist, a small grey woman in a cardigan, looked at me and then at him, and her eyebrows rose.

"You came back," she said.

"Seven years late."

"Better than never." She turned to me. "You're the one he phoned about."

"I'm Tuuli."

"I've heard." She had a dry, tired voice. "He told my receptionist he needed a room for the two of us and a long answer."

I sat on the plastic chair beside the bed and kept my hand on his knee.

"Ask her," Niko said.

He had told me in the truck what he wanted to ask.

He had not told me he would make me say it.

"Does it ever get better?" I asked. "Can he learn faces?"

"No." The neurologist said it kindly. "It's lifelong, and it isn't a loss of love or a lack of attention."

"His eyes work perfectly."

"The part of the brain that holds a face as a face doesn't, and nothing he does can change that."

My throat tightened.

I had known it, but I'd wanted to hear someone with a clipboard say it.

"What I tell families," she went on, "is that the people who love him have to be his faces."

"Whatever you give him, give it twice and give it daily. Habit is the only thing that survives a crowd."

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