“I had the same face and hair, Eric,” she said, using his name for the first time. “But you couldn’t sing. You couldn’t even talk. I remembered that better than how you looked. It stayed with me. I was coming out of unconsciousness, Ariel. Please have a little pity. I had swallowed copious amounts of seawater—I was coughing it up for the rest of the day, and lay in bed with a fever for three nights. I narrowly avoided pneumonia and there’s still a little bit of a twinge in my lungs on certain days if I cough too hard.” “Oh,” Ariel said, taken aback. She hadn’t thought it was like that at all.
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