Harris and his team repaired the damage over two weeks, smoothing new plaster and repainting Emma’s room a brighter shade of blue. They left one small section of the original wall intact, where the graphite names remained visible under glass. Lucy wanted that much permanence, that much acknowledgement.
That evening, on her call with the therapist, she struggled to find words. “It was real,” she said at last. “There was a room. A bunk, names on the wall. People lived in there, or tried to. The sounds weren’t in my head. They were… the house remembering.”