Kincaid moved back to the swing a while after Minogue left, letting the quiet soak in. But his temporary ease began to turn, the light over the treeline shifted too quickly, the holodeck trying to simulate the slow creep of dusk and instead producing a flicker that reminded him he was in a room full of technology.

The porch steps creaked, correctly, this time, and he did not have to look to know it was Meredith.

“Jimmy,” she said softly.

“Are you off shift already?” he asked.

“Yes. I did as you suggested, walked in the arboretum. But it had no interest alone. I thought I’d find you here.” She paused at the bottom step, taking in the house. “You built it right down to the ugly parts.”

He smiled. “Warts and all.”

Her eyes roved over the porch, then back to him. “You’ve not been yourself since Boreth.”

“I’m trying, Merry.” He looked away, out at the holographic trees. “I keep thinking about the loop. Every time it reset, I was on the ground. Bleeding out, concussed, lost a limb or something. Trying to remember which version of the day I was in. The Klingons were shouting, the Vaadwaur kept coming. I think, in one of the loops, I stayed dead. And now?” he held out his hands, unscarred, steady, “the body’s fine. But it still feels like I didn’t walk away.”

Meredith came up the steps and stood behind the swing, her hands resting on his shoulders. “Your mind doesn’t reset just because the clock does,” she said. “The injury’s gone, but the memory is cellular. It’s in you.”

Somewhere in the background, a holodeck cricket chirped, looping every few seconds. “The Klingons are already calling it a glorious victory,” he said bitterly.

“And what do you call it?”

He thought about the Vaadwaur, the way each loop had taught him something new about where they would come from, where they would die. “I call it too many boxes to keep shut. And I’m running out of space to store them.”

Meredith gave his shoulders a gentle squeeze. “Then maybe stop storing them.”

“And do what instead?”

She did not answer, just sat beside him on the swing. Kincaid felt the swing shift under their combined weight, the faint vibration of her knee against his. He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon.

The program had rendered the low line of hills perfectly, but not the sense that something might crest them at any moment.

The time loop had been a neat trick of the time crystals. Neat, if you were in an office, learning it from a computer. Inside of it, it was a grinder. No matter how many resets, the air always carried the same mix of blood and disruptor discharge, and the Klingon shouts of alarm came in exactly three beats before the next wave.

You could plan for it. You could time your shots. You could shave seconds off your response. You could still die. He remembered the fourth loop most clearly. He had pulled a Klingon out from under a fallen beam, dragged him halfway to the edge of the wall before a Vaadwaur blast had torn through his side.

He had felt his own ribs go, his lungs collapse like wet paper. He had choked on the metallic tang in his throat and then the world had gone white. And come back, whole.

It was supposed to be a gift so that the Klingons could defend themselves, that erasure. No lingering wound, no recovery time. But it had stolen the proof that any of it had happened, except in his head. No scar to point at, no limp to explain. Just him, intact and pretending that he felt as unscathed as he looked.

The swing creaked again, and Meredith shifted, watching him. “You’re holding your breath again,” she said quietly.

He forced an exhale, long and slow, like letting steam out of an overworked engine. “Feels like if I let it all out at once, it will all consume me”.

The holodeck wind tried to fill the gap with the scent of dry leaves and chimney smoke. He knew the algorithm, temperature drop of three degrees, olfactory cue pattern number fourteen. A poor substitute for the real air, or perhaps that was a reflection of his mood.

He leaned back, eyes tracing the contours of the Stone House. He had come here to remember a place that had been permanent. But the truth pressed in like a dull ache: even stone could be sold, passed on, made into someone else’s home.

On Boreth, he had learned that nothing was permanent, not even dying.

Meredith’s hand stayed on his shoulder for a moment longer, then slid away. “You’re doing what patients do when they’ve been patched up too quickly,” she said, voice measured. “You think the absence of a wound means the absence of damage.”

“I’ve heard the speech before, wife.”

“You’ve given that speech before, husband. Stealing my good ideas to motivate your security teams.” She shifted to face him more directly. “What happens if I close a wound without pulling out the shrapnel?”

“You get an infection. You get sepsis. You lose a limb.”

“Exactly.” She let the word hang in the air, then added, “Trauma works the same way. The Vaadwaur didn’t leave shrapnel in your body, but they left it somewhere.”

He rubbed at the skin just under his ribs, an unconscious habit. “Feels more like they left a minefield. Not sure which step sets it off.”

“That’s the part you can map, Jimmy. Same as on the battlefield. You don’t charge through a minefield, you mark every one you find.” She leaned forward, catching his gaze. “What was the first one? The first thing you remember when you think about Boreth?”

He thought of the Klingon’s war cries first, the shouts of violence and triumph that signalled another wave. He thought of the fourth loop, the collapse of his lungs, the white-out. But what surprised him was the smaller things: the smell of the mud when he hit the ground. Cold, wet, clinging to his gloves.

“Mud,” he said.

“All right. That’s one. What’s the next?”

He hesitated. “A sound. Klingons shouting, half war cry, half pain.”

Meredith gave a small nod, as though she were ticking off items on a medical chart. “Good. Keep going.”

They went on like that. He spoke in short bursts, each one a marker on the battlefield of his memory. She did not push when he stalled. She waited.

After a while, the list formed an outline of the loop’s architecture: the smell of ozone from disruptor fire, the taste of iron in his mouth, the momentary stillness right before the next reset. When he stopped, she sat back.

“Now you know where some of them are. It doesn’t mean you can walk through the minefield unscathed tomorrow, but you can have confidence in a few more steps. Then you call in help,” she said simply. “You’ve got a medic on hand.”

The sky darkened to a deep slate. Then, from somewhere overhead, came the first patter of rain on the roof. Soft, irregular, finding the warped spots in the shingles before it gathered into a steady rhythm. It was almost right.

Kincaid was relieved that it was tot Boreth rain, their storms had been dangerous, sharp, metallic, stinking of scorched air. But Stone House rain. Slow, unhurried, with no battle waiting in it.

“You always used to tell me you slept better during storms,” she said, leaning back against the swing.

“I still do.” He let the sound wash over him, the creak of the swing now blending with the hiss of water in the gutters. It did not erase the fear of the memories, but it made them quieter, less ready to go off at the slightest thought.

The rain was persistent now, tracing little rivulets down the porch steps, pooling in the low spot by the lilac bush. He could almost smell the damp wood, almost feel the way the air in Pennsylvania used to press against his skin before a storm. He let his eyes close.

“I was about nine,” he said after a while. “My grandmother was making soup. I was supposed to be helping, but I kept sneaking outside. There was this gutter that always overflowed in heavy rain. I’d put an old coffee tin under it to catch the water. Don’t know why. I just liked the sound it made when it filled.”

Meredith waited.

“One time, she caught me out there. I thought I’d get yelled at for tracking mud into the kitchen. But she just handed me another tin, like it was the most normal thing in the world. We stood there, listening to them fill up. No talking. Just the rain.”

The memory sat warm in his chest, the details sharper than he had realised they still were. The colour of her sweater, the way the porch light glowed in the puddles. For a moment, the loops on Boreth felt farther away, their edges dulled.

The rain kept its pace, steady enough that it felt like it could go on forever. Kincaid did not want it to end, but something in him, small and stubborn, wanted to see what else the program could hold.

“Computer,” he said, “add a coffee tin under the gutter by the lilac bush. Make it half full.”

A faint shimmer, and there it was: a battered metal tin, close enough to what he remembered. Water fell into it with a soft, resonant plink.

Meredith tilted her head toward him. “Is that your favourite addition?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Thought it was time the place sounded right.”

They sat in the mingled music of rain on the roof and water in the tin. For the first time, he did not feel like the Stone House was a static memory.

Meredith’s gaze lingered on the tin, the rain plinking steadily into it. “You know,” she said after a while, “I could clear my schedule tonight.”

Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “That’s a dangerous thing to say to a man with a holodeck program and no supervision.”

She smiled. “I mean we could stay here. All night. Let the program run. Give you a full day at the Stone House.”

He almost told her no. But then the rain shifted, a little gust adding a patter against the porch screen, and he thought about sleeping with that sound in his ears instead of the flat, sterile hum of his quarters. “Fine,” he said. “But we’re going out for breakfast.”

“Computer,” she said, ignoring him, “extend program to include night-time cycles. Activate the woodstove in the main room. Engage olfactory sequence, burnt oak and apple logs.”

The air changed, warmth bleeding in from the open doorway, the faint crackle of fire inside.

Kincaid stood, stepping into the house. The imperfections he had programmed into the floorboards felt different underfoot now, the house less like a diorama and more like a living space.

Meredith took the armchair by the fire. He stretched out on the sofa, boots on the worn quilt his grandmother had once used to hide the sun-faded cushions.

The rain softened as the night deepened, replaced now and then by the tick of cooling wood from the stove. Somewhere between the shift of the logs and the next gust against the windows, his breathing eased, his mind unclenched. Sleep came quietly, like it used to in the real Stone House, unannounced, unforced.

When he woke, light was spilling through the lace curtains. The smell reached him first, coffee, strong enough to cut through the lingering smell of the stove.

He opened his eyes to sunlight patterning the ceiling, the lace curtain shadows shifting gently with the breeze. For a moment, he was not sure if he had dreamed the whole thing. The sofa felt exactly like the one from his boyhood, lumpy in the middle, the quilt rough-woven and warm. And incredibly uncomfortable to an old man waking up.

Meredith was already up. He could hear her moving in the kitchen, the subtle clink of mugs and the muted scrape of a chair leg against the floorboards. He sat up slowly, stretching until the stiffness in his back popped loose.

The rain had stopped. Through the open front door, he saw the coffee tin glinting in the sun, full to the brim. He padded into the kitchen.

“You didn’t have to make breakfast,” he said.

“I didn’t,” Meredith replied without turning around. “I collected coffee from the replicator in the corridor.”

A memory surfaced, one he had not called for. Him, maybe twelve, perched on this same table with his legs swinging, holding a mug half full of milk and coffee while his grandmother fried eggs in a pan. He could smell it, hear the sizzle. It was not Boreth. It was not the loops. It was just a morning.