“Her hair’s looking mad now with blonde roots coming through all over the place—it always grew fast. It’s got this chaotic kind of charm.”
Thane grunted in acknowledgment, eyes on his toast. He would do anything to be able to measure these small changes.
“She had to cut it for the mission, you know,” Callum continued. “She was thinking about shaving it all off a week ago…said it’d be easier. She was only half-kidding. Maybe.”
“She would be beautiful no matter what she did with her hair,” Thane murmured, more to his coffee than to Callum.
There was a pause.
“She’s being moved out of HDU today into a room in the main ward,” Callum said, a thread of excitement in his voice. “Physio’s already underway. She’s young and healthy, the doctor said. She’s recovering well.”
Thane didn’t speak, only nodded.
Callum leaned forward slightly, elbows on the cheap plastic table. “We’ve agreed to give her space. Let her heal. You showing up shook her.”
“I know,” Thane said, the toast suddenly tasted like dust on his tongue.
” We found her because of a boy called Ellis. His sister was with those monsters and they used him as bait to lure more girls.”
Thane looked up. Callum could understand why he used contacts. Looking into his unusual eyes was unnerving. It was like two different people inhabited his body.
Callum continued, “I think he hated what he had to do. But he managed to break his sister out. Then he somehow found Arthur. That’s the only reason we found her.”
Thane swallowed hard, the motion barely visible under the tension in his jaw.
“She draws—line drawings and pastels,” Callum added gently. “I saw one of her sketchbooks, by accident, years ago. Your eyes were in there, but the face was of a small boy.”
Thane looked at him fully, and something flickered across his face.
“I made the connection when I saw you without your contacts,” Callum continued. “Didn’t say anything at the time. Cormac thought Thane was someone who hurt her. In a way, you did, without knowing it or being able to help it, right? But you were not the only one. We all let her down in different ways.”
Thane flinched. Regret did not erase the truth.
They both sat in silence, watching the steam rise off their cups, curling like memory.
“It took her six months,” Callum finally said. “Six months before she could even speak to us properly after we found her. She’d flinch at slammed doors. Drop things and run when we startled her. She couldn’t sleep through the night. The therapist got her to start journaling, said it would help make sense of things.”
Thane cleared his throat. “Why did she tell us her name was Dorothy?”
Callum gave a slow, sad smile. “You’ll have to ask her that yourself.”
Another pause.
“She used to read to us,” Thane said quietly, as if the thought had crept up behind him. “All of us. We had nothing. It was either terror or boredom. But she’d read and make us forget for a while. After I got out, I started reading because of her.”
Callum tilted his head, intrigued.
“’Charlotte’s web.’ ‘Treasure Island.’ ‘Wuthering Heights,’ though I didn’t understand half of that one. ‘Famous Five.’ ‘Secret Seven.’ ‘Sherlock Holmes.’ And ‘Wizard of Oz,’ of course.”
Callum frowned. “She once told me she had two books while she was in there. Just two. ‘The Wizard of Oz’… and a ‘Famous Five’ book. Nothing else. They gave them to her, probably to keep her quiet.”
Thane nodded his head. He knew that now.
“It’s her photographic memory,” Callum said. “You probably didn’t know…not many do, and she wouldn’t have told you. My dad and I figured it out years ago. But everything she read, she remembered. Every line. Probably recited the whole lot to you boys from memory.”
“She kept me sane,” Thane said, voice gravel-rough. “I didn’t know it then. She is the only reason why I’m still alive.”
Callum sat back, studying him for a moment. Then he nodded. “She wanted to find you, you know. Said she had to see you with her own eyes. She transferred to your school.”
