He explained that identification in 2008 had relied on limited databases; long-term care patients weren’t routinely cross-matched then. “If your coma patient is Ward,” he said cautiously, “you may have found someone we lost twice.” He asked Helen to keep him updated; he would meanwhile try reaching out to Ward’s last known kin.
During quiet hours, Helen began feeding his recorded speech into a linguistic tool used in neuro-rehabilitation. The transcript startled her. Amid the broken phrases, distinct clusters of geological vocabulary appeared like fault lines in language: basalt, magma plume, pressure gradient, ridge shift. This wasn’t random—something in him was still working.