From 2005.

She wheeled Charles across the small room to the window. “What’s your name?” he asked, eyeing her.

“I’m helping take care of you,” she said, brushing a strand of honey-blonde hair out of her eyes. Something familiar there, something in the eyes he tried to connect with — a memory chased down the dark tunnels of his heart.

“You remind me of my wife,” Charles said abruptly, looking out at the garden. Frozen over, with a solitary squirrel without a cache of nuts for the winter. “Claire, that was her name.” She stirred behind him.

The hair had been brown once, he could picture it. Now this woman dyed it. “I met her right after the war ended. In a bar. Or maybe a party, I don’t know. It blurs together.”

She gently turned the wheelchair around. “Did you love her?” she asked him, pallid blue eyes searching his.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Right up until the very end.”

The woman sighed. “What happened to her?”

He saw it in her eyes. She’d been here before. She always wanted the same thing, the thing he couldn’t give her: the memory.

The moment passed. Charles glanced back at the window, but the squirrel was gone. “I think you’d better go,” he said, not unkindly.

The woman frowned. “Are you mad at me?”

“No, not at all.”

“I, I don’t understand, I thought you were–”

An orderly appeared at her side, straightening the woman’s bathrobe. “That’s all right,” the orderly soothed. “It’s time to go back to your room.”

Charles sighed and wheeled himself around. “Any luck today?” the orderly asked.

“There’s always hope,” he answered, voice raspy, feeling his age.

“Come on, Claire,” the orderly said. One hand around the elderly woman’s shoulders, he led her down the hall.