By the time the little girl in the yellow raincoat reached the iron gates of the Hayes mansion, the California sky looked like it was trying to tear itself apart.

Lightning forked over the Pacific, turning the glass-and-stone estate above Malibu into a brief, ghostly castle. Inside, in a home office bigger than most apartments in Los Angeles, billionaire tech founder Noah Hayes barely glanced at the storm. His empire lived in numbers and charts on a 34-inch monitor, and the rest of the world—rain, wind, people—existed mostly as background noise.

He was signing off on a quarterly report when the house seemed to shudder. Thunder rolled in from the ocean. Somewhere far below, at the outer gate, someone pressed the intercom twice, then gave up. No one heard.

The girl didn’t. She just put her small hand on the cold metal and looked up at the security camera, face streaked with rain and city dust, then started walking.

By the time she made it all the way up the winding driveway, her sneakers were soaked, her backpack had surrendered its fight against the storm, and her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. She climbed the stone steps, hesitated in front of the twelve-foot front door, and knocked.

The sound was too shy for a house that big. Three soft knocks against a storm that could swallow a city.

Noah heard them anyway.

He frowned, pushed back from his desk, and checked the time on the glowing corner of his screen. 10:02 p.m. The staff had gone to their quarters. The main gates were locked. Nobody should be here.

He crossed the marble entrance hall, passing the abstract art his interior designer swore made the place feel “warm” and “human.” He hit a switch; exterior floodlights flared to life, washing the front steps in white.

He opened the door with irritation already loaded on his face.

The irritation died instantly.

A little girl stood alone on his doorstep, rain pouring off the brim of her too-big hood. Brown hair plastered to her cheeks. Backpack clutched to her chest. Eyes—huge, dark, and much too old for her size—locked on his.

She looked up at the man the internet called “America’s coldest genius,” took a shaky breath, and said, “Sorry, Dad. I’m late.”

For a second, the storm went silent.

Noah’s fingers tightened on the door handle. He actually glanced over her shoulder, half expecting a camera crew to jump out of the bushes and yell that he’d been pranked.

“You’re… what?” he asked, voice flat.

The girl swallowed. “You’re Noah Hayes, right? From Hayes Dynamics? You’re on TV sometimes. My mom showed me.” Her lips trembled, but her voice didn’t. “I’m Emily. You’re my dad.”

That word—dad—landed like a punch. Not soft. Not gentle. An impact.

“I think you’re mistaken,” he said automatically. The reflex voice. The one that handled executives, shareholders, senators.

Rain sheeted behind her, needling into the night. The Pacific wind shoved cold air into the doorway. She didn’t flinch.

“Mom said you wouldn’t know about me,” Emily said. “She said if something happened, I had to memorize your address. She said you’d be mad, but you’d help.”

A clap of thunder broke over the ridge. The girl jumped, her small body jolting backward—almost off the step. Instinct snapped before logic. Noah’s hand shot out, steadying her shoulder.

Her sweatshirt was freezing. Her bones felt like they were made of ice.

“How did you get here?” he asked, softer now.

“Taxi.” She dug into the soggy pocket of her jacket and pulled out a wad of crumpled dollar bills. “Emergency money. For… for finding you.”

“If this is some kind of—” he started, then stopped. The words felt obscene when directed at someone whose sneakers squeaked rain on his marble.

He saw lawsuits, set-ups, headlines. Billionaire blindsided by “secret daughter.” He saw a thousand ways this could be a trap.

He also saw a child. Alone. In a storm. In a country where his company’s logo lit up Times Square screens while this girl’s backpack had more holes than seams.

“Come inside,” he said abruptly, stepping back. “We’ll figure this out.”

She crossed into the foyer, dripping on the polished floor, eyes traveling up the floating staircase, the chandelier, the paintings. The mansion, featured in glossy New York magazines as “the new American castle,” suddenly felt cavernous in a way that had nothing to do with square footage.

“What’s your mom’s full name?” he asked as he closed the door on the storm.

“Clare Donovan,” Emily answered without hesitating.

The name hit him like a blank screen. Nothing. No face. No memory. He’d dated models, lawyers, a venture capitalist from San Francisco, a designer from Brooklyn. None of them had been named Clare.

“You’re… how old?” he asked.

“Five.” She lifted a hand, fingers spread, a tiny American flag bracelet sliding down her wrist.

Five. He counted backwards without meaning to. That put her conception right in the middle of the year he barely remembered for reasons he’d never thought too hard about.

She sneezed. It was such an ordinary sound that all his boardroom instincts stepped aside for something unfamiliar and rusty.

“You need to get warm,” he said. “Come on.”

He led her upstairs to one of the guest suites that usually only saw European investors and West Coast founders. “I don’t have any kids’ clothes,” he muttered, pulling a plain white Stanford t-shirt from a drawer. “This will have to be a nightgown. Bathroom’s through there. Hot water’s on the right. Take a bath. I’ll get you something to eat.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, clutching the shirt like it was woven from gold.

Downstairs, in the sleek kitchen that had mostly known takeout containers and black coffee, Noah stared at a loaf of bread like it was a puzzle he didn’t remember how to solve. He made a sandwich. Started water for instant soup. His phone sat on the counter, black screen reflecting his face.

Call the police, his logical brain said. This is what authorities are for. Lost kid. Strange story. Let the system handle it. That’s what the system is for.

Another voice—quieter, older—asked a different question: And what if she’s telling the truth?

He typed “Clare Donovan” into a search bar out of habit. A thousand results: a Boston accountant, an Ohio fitness blogger, a Texas chef. None of them fit.

Fifteen minutes later, light footsteps padded into the kitchen. Emily wore the white t-shirt like a dress, bare legs goose-pimpled, hair damp and darker.

He set the plate and bowl in front of her. “Eat,” he said. “Then you’re going to tell me everything.”

She ate like someone who didn’t trust the next meal to arrive on time. Between bites, she answered his questions.

They’d been staying in a mid-range hotel off the 101, near Santa Monica. They moved a lot—Seattle, Denver, Portland. “Mom says we’re explorers,” she said.

“And tonight?” he asked. “How did you get separated?”

“There were a lot of people at the store. One second she was next to me. Then she wasn’t.” Emily stared at the soup. “I waited a long time. She didn’t come back. She always said if we ever got separated and I couldn’t find her, I should come here.”

“She told you I’d… help,” Noah said.

“She said you drink your coffee black,” Emily went on. “No sugar. Double.” Her nose wrinkled. “It sounds gross.”

He froze. That was his order. Every morning. Every day. Double Americano, no sugar. Baristas from San Francisco to New York knew it. It wasn’t a state secret—but it wasn’t something you’d guess.

“And she said,” Emily added carefully, “that you used to play a piano song with ‘moon’ in the name. She called it your ‘thinking music.’”

“Clair de Lune,” he murmured, before he could stop himself.

Her face lit up. “Yes! That’s it!”

Lightning flashed over the ocean. Thunder followed like a delayed warning.

Noah sat there, billionaire brain full of physics and finance, staring at a child who knew his coffee order and his favorite Debussy piece.

It took three days to confirm what a simple test would later scream at him in printed letters.

The hotel existed. The staff remembered a woman named Clare checking in with a little girl. Security footage showed them entering a grocery store together. Cameras caught Clare leaving in a panic, searching aisles, scanning faces, then bolting out into the parking lot.

She never came back.

The police opened a missing persons case. A detective with tired eyes and an L.A. Dodgers mug took notes. “We’ll do everything we can,” he said, in that careful tone that meant nobody was promising anything.

Meanwhile, Emily stayed.

The mansion started to change.

Cartoons replaced cable news on one of the living-room TVs. The chef stopped preparing plated, photographed meals and learned that pasta with tomato sauce and way too much cheese fed more joy than any Michelin-chasing dish.

Noah’s lawyer, Diane, a sharp woman who wore simple suits and could quote Delaware corporate law by heart, sat in his office and listened to his clipped description of the problem.

“I want a paternity test,” he said.

“You understand what it means if it’s positive,” she replied. “In a legal sense. In a public sense.”

“I understand I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Just get the test.”

The nurse from the private lab came that afternoon. A swab inside his cheek. A swab inside Emily’s. Emily submitted like she’d rehearsed it.

“Mom said you might want this someday,” she said calmly. “She said not to be scared of it.”

He wasn’t scared. Not exactly.

Forty-eight hours later, a man from the lab called his private line while Noah was in his office, staring at a graph that suddenly meant nothing.

“The probability of paternity is greater than 99.9%,” the man said. “There is no doubt. The child is your biological daughter.”

The numbers blurred.

He hung up without saying much, walked into the media room where Emily was watching a cartoon, and just stood there.

“They called, didn’t they?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I knew it.” Her smile wasn’t smug. It was relief, like she’d finally handed off a burden she’d been carrying since before she was old enough to spell the word “burden.”

“How did you know?” he asked. “When I didn’t?”

“Mom said it was complicated,” Emily answered, in the solemn tone kids use when repeating adult words they don’t fully understand. “She said something happened and you forgot who you really were. But she said deep down you were a good man.”

The word “good” landed heavier than “dad” had.

He sat down beside her. “I don’t remember your mother,” he said. Saying it out loud felt like confessing something shameful. “Not at all.”

“That’s okay,” Emily said, patting his hand, tiny palm warm. “Mom said it wasn’t your fault.”

If it wasn’t his fault, then whose was it?

He found the answer in his own medical records.

The report from six years earlier read like a technical manual for someone else’s brain. Car accident on a rain-slick freeway outside San Francisco. Severe traumatic brain injury. Partial retrograde amnesia affecting approximately fourteen months before the event. Cognitive function otherwise intact.

He stared at the line that mattered most.

Follow-up recommended. Prognosis for memory recovery: uncertain.

Fourteen months. The blank stretch he’d always glossed over. The time people referenced in vague phrases that never quite added up. “You were going through a lot,” his father had once said, after an investor dinner in Manhattan. “It’s better now. You’re back on track.”

Back on track for who?

The neurologist he hadn’t seen in years looked older but no less precise when Noah sat across from him in a sleek San Francisco office.

“Why did no one tell me I lost over a year of my life?” Noah asked.

“I informed your family,” the doctor said. “Your father made decisions about how much you were told. He was concerned about your stress level.”

“My father,” Noah repeated, the word suddenly tasting different.

The doctor pulled up notes. “You did come to see me a few times afterward. You insisted on returning to work. You said you preferred not to dig into what you’d forgotten.”

“I don’t remember that,” Noah said.

“That,” the neurologist replied mildly, “is the difficult part about amnesia.”

Therapy followed. Memory work. A neuropsychologist with kind eyes and relentless patience named Dr. Chen led him into visualizations with soft music and strategic questions.

He lay back on a comfortable couch in an office with a view of the Bay Bridge. She played Debussy and asked him to walk down an imaginary hallway of doors.

“Open whichever door draws you,” she said softly. “Don’t force it.”

Behind one door, he smelled coffee. Heard the hiss of steam. Saw a corner table in a small café in Seattle or Portland or maybe right here in California. His laptop open. A hand setting down a mug. A laugh. Then—white static.

Behind another door, the steady beep of hospital machines. A woman’s voice, raw from crying. “Please, just let me see him. He needs to know. He needs to know about the baby.”

Then another voice, deep, controlled, unmistakably American corporate royalty. “He doesn’t need confusion right now. My son needs to recover. We will handle everything.”

His father.

The more Noah dug, the more the blank space took shape around a missing person named Clare.

His security chief, Marcus—ex-military, calm, used to dealing with hostile takeovers of a different kind—sat in his home office in Los Angeles and spread photos on the table. City after city. ID after ID.

“She’s used at least half a dozen last names in the last six years,” Marcus said. “We tracked her through short-term rentals, cash jobs, quiet neighborhoods from Denver to Seattle. She keeps her head down. No social media. No paper trail.”

“Who lives like that?” Noah asked.

“People who are scared,” Marcus said. “People who know someone with money and influence wants them gone.”

They interviewed people who’d rented to her. A landlord in Denver who remembered a woman who double-checked locks twice a night. A neighbor in Portland who said Clare never stood with her back to a window. A bookstore owner in Seattle who slid across a photo he’d kept.

Clare on a park bench in a Seattle neighborhood, Emily at three years old tucked under her arm, both smiling shyly at the camera. On the back, one word written in neat script: Remember.

The word followed him back to Los Angeles. Into the music room where the grand piano that had appeared in more than one American interior-design magazine sat under a thin layer of dust.

He lifted the cover, sat down, and let his fingers hover over the keys. Emily appeared in the doorway like she’d heard a secret signal.

“Are you going to play?” she asked, eyes wide.

He tried.

At first his hands fumbled like they belonged to someone else. Then muscle memory took over. Clair de Lune flowed into the high ceiling. The melancholy melody filled the room, spilled into the hallway, climbed the wide stairs.

With each measure, something inside him loosened. Not a full memory—yet. But the feeling of one.

“You play like fairy music,” Emily whispered when he finished, reverent in a way no shareholder had ever been.

During the day, he ran a billion-dollar company—a Silicon Valley darling with offices in San Francisco and New York, contracts with government agencies in Washington D.C., its stock ticker crawling along the bottom of financial news channels.

At night, he learned how to do bedtime.

He spilled milk learning how much cereal a five-year-old actually ate. Burned grilled cheese on his first attempt. Read the same picture book three nights in a row because Emily loved the part where the lost bear found his way home.

“Did you always work this much?” she asked one evening, watching him answer emails at the kitchen island while pasta boiled.

“Yes,” he said.

“Mom says people who are always busy are sometimes a little sad,” Emily said. “Too busy to notice.”

He didn’t answer.

When his family arrived at the mansion three weeks later, it wasn’t for a friendly Sunday brunch.

Three luxury cars pulled up in the circular driveway, just the kind that lined Beverly Hills streets. A black Bentley. Two SUVs with tinted windows. The Hayes family had arrived like a boardroom in motion.

Gerald Hayes stepped out first. The patriarch. Chairman of Hayes Dynamics. The man business magazines in New York and London called “America’s last old-school titan.” His suit was charcoal. His expression colder than the rain that had almost killed his son years earlier.

His wife, Eleanor, elegant and remote, walked beside him. Behind them: Noah’s older brother Richard, tailored like he’d been born in a board seat, and his sister Caroline, softer, eyes already uneasy.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Gerald asked as soon as they were in the living room. No hug. No hello. Just reproach. “We had to hear from your lawyer that some child and her mother are trying to attach themselves to this family.”

“Emily is not ‘some child,’” Noah said. “She’s my daughter.”

“DNA can be arranged,” Richard said, shrugging. “Especially when there are billions in play.”

“Clare hasn’t asked for a cent,” Noah fired back. “She hasn’t even appeared. She sent Emily here because she thought I could keep her safe.”

“Or because she knows the first step in any scam is building emotional leverage,” Gerald said calmly. “Use the child to get to the money.”

The living-room door opened. Emily stepped in, fresh from the backyard, hair mussed, sneakers slightly dusty, wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon astronaut.

She froze at the sight of so many adults watching her like a case file.

“Emily,” Noah said gently. “Come here.”

She crossed the room, slipped her hand into his.

“Who are they?” she whispered.

“My parents,” he said. “My brother. My sister. They’re your family, too.”

Gerald studied her, his gaze clinical. “She has the Hayes eyes,” he said eventually, as if discussing a stock trend. “And the nose.”

The air pressed down on her small shoulders.

“What did your mother tell you about us?” Gerald asked.

Emily shrank closer to Noah. “Nothing,” she said. “She only talked about my dad.”

That word again. Dad. In the room where it had never been spoken before.

“Enough,” Noah snapped. “You don’t interrogate a child.”

He sent Emily to the kitchen with the housekeeper. When the door closed, he faced the people who had once controlled his entire life.

“You kept things from me,” he said. “About my accident. About my memory loss. About Clare.”

Gerald didn’t deny it. He never denied when he thought he’d been right.

“You were on a destructive path,” his father said. “Throwing away your future on a woman with no background, no connections. A coffee shop waitress. We did what we had to do.”

“You had no right,” Noah said.

“We had every right to protect this family,” Gerald replied. “We built an American success story, Noah. Hayes Dynamics is a symbol. You don’t let some temporary distraction rewrite that.”

“Temporary distraction?” Clare would later repeat, with a laugh that held no humor when Noah told her.

Because three weeks after that confrontation, in a simple guest house off a quiet highway near the Pacific Northwest coast, he knocked on a door and met the woman his father had called a distraction.

Safe Harbor looked nothing like the world Noah was used to. Faded paint. Neon sign buzzing. A front desk staffed by an older woman in a sweatshirt that said “Oregon Strong.”

“Room 8,” she said after Emily’s anxious “Please, she’s my mom” cracked something soft inside her.

He walked down the narrow hallway with Emily’s hand clamped to his. His heart hammered. Not from the flight up from LAX or the 5 a.m. start, but from something more primal.

He knocked.

“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called. Lightly accented, like she’d spent years picking up sounds from different cities.

“Mom, it’s me,” Emily said.

The chain slid. The knob turned. The door opened.

Clare Donovan stood there in worn jeans and a gray t-shirt, hair shorter than in the Seattle photo, face thinner, eyes ringed with tired shadows.

Those eyes. Intelligent, wary, warm and guarded at the same time.

She saw Emily first.

“Sweetheart,” she whispered, then tried to say more. Her voice broke. She dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around her daughter like someone grabbing onto a lifeline.

Emily sobbed and laughed in the same breath.

Then Clare looked up. At him.

When their eyes met, something detonated behind his forehead. Not pain. Not exactly. More like an overloaded circuit finally arcing.

He saw a coffee shop near downtown. Early-morning light over Seattle streets. Her, younger, in a slate apron, spilling coffee on his expensive suit. Her horrified apology. His unexpected laugh. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “I hated that tie anyway.”

He actually swayed.

“Noah,” she said softly, his name landing somewhere deep and familiar. “You came.”

“Clare,” he managed. The word felt both new and worn.

Inside, the room was small. One bed. One duffel. A stack of papers. The life of someone perpetually ready to run.

After Emily left with Marcus to fetch pancakes and orange juice from a nearby diner, Clare sat on the edge of the bed, hands twisted together. “You don’t remember me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Pieces,” he admitted. “A coffee shop. A ring. A fight with my father. Then the crash. After that, nothing until I woke up in the hospital and everything was… reset.”

Her jaw tightened. “Your father told me you lost some memories. That the doctors said any extra emotional stress would slow your recovery. He said I was… a complication you didn’t need anymore.”

“You believed him,” Noah said, though he already knew the answer.

“No,” she said sharply. “I tried to see you. Every day for two weeks. They turned me away at the hospital doors. I wrote you. Called. I went to your company once; security knew my face and escorted me out before I got near the elevator.”

He pictured it now: his father signing forms, giving orders. Cuts made not in balance sheets, but in people.

“Then I found out I was pregnant,” Clare said. “I thought, okay, even he can’t keep you from knowing about your child. I was wrong.”

Her voice roughened as she described the quiet pressure that followed. Visits from family attorneys. “Friendly” offers to relocate. The “coincidences” that made jobs vanish, leases evaporate.

“I left,” she said finally. “Not because I wanted to, but because staying meant putting Emily in danger. I thought the safest thing was disappearing. I moved us across states, changed names, worked under the table. Always one step ahead. I kept thinking you’d come looking. But how could you, when they made sure you didn’t even remember I existed?”

He felt sick. There were no words big enough for six stolen years.

“I’m so sorry,” he said at last. “For everything you had to do alone. For every night you spent looking over your shoulder while I sat in boardrooms thinking my life was complete. I’m sorry I wasn’t there, even if I didn’t know how to be.”

She shook her head, eyes glassy. “You didn’t choose the accident. You didn’t choose the amnesia. They used you too. You were just… easier to control that way.”

He stepped closer, slowly, like she was a wild animal he didn’t want to startle. “I’m remembering more,” he said. “Dr. Chen’s work… it’s helping. I remember us in a small apartment somewhere near Pike Place. You complaining about my suit jackets hogging all the closet space. Me trying to cook and almost setting off the alarm.”

She laughed through tears. “You tried to make pancakes. You flipped one onto the floor and insisted it was ‘a deliberate test of gravity.’”

He smiled, the memory bright and sharp now. “You said my jokes needed work.”

“Still do,” she said softly.

Emily burst back into the room with a paper bag and a grin, and the three of them ate diner pancakes on a sagging mattress while the world outside kept spinning: stock markets opening in New York, traffic clogging the 405 in Los Angeles, morning joggers along the Oregon coast.

“Come home with me,” Noah said when the plates were empty. “Both of you. We’ll figure everything else out after that. Lawyers, security, all of it. Just… come home.”

Clare looked at her daughter, who nodded instantly, hope written all over her face.

“We’ll try,” she said finally. “But I won’t marry into your family’s control again. Not with secrets. Not with someone else holding the pen on our story.”

“Then we write it ourselves,” he said.

Three weeks later, standing in the living room of the Hayes mansion with Clare at his side and his family lined up like a skeptical jury, he gave his father a choice.

“I remember,” he said. “I remember the coffee shop, the apartment, the engagement, the fight, the accident. I remember Clare being at my bedside until you had her removed. I know you sent people to push her out of my life. I know you made sure I never knew I had a daughter.”

“You’re letting personal feelings cloud your judgment,” Gerald said, as if this were another merger.

“No,” Noah said. “For the first time in my life, I’m not. Clare and Emily stay with me. If any of you threaten them again, if I see one more shadow following them down a street in any city, I walk away. From the company. From the Hayes name. From all of it.”

Silence. Heavy. Shocked.

“You’d abandon everything we built,” his father said slowly, “for this?”

“For my family,” Noah said. “The one you tried very hard to erase.”

Caroline looked between them, tears in her eyes. “He shouldn’t have done it,” she said quietly. “He shouldn’t have chosen for you.” Her voice shook, but she stayed standing next to her brother.

Gerald’s face hardened. “You’ll regret this,” he said. “One day.”

“Maybe,” Noah said. “But today isn’t that day.”

Months later, Gerald still hadn’t forgiven him. Richard sulked in boardrooms in New York. Press releases went out carefully worded, talk shows speculated, think pieces were written about “Dynasty vs. Choice: When Founders Turn Their Backs on Legacy.”

None of that mattered at the small house on a Pacific beach where waves rolled in steady as breath and seals sometimes popped their heads up just beyond the breakers.

The house wasn’t on a magazine cover. Not yet. It didn’t have a chandelier. Its floors were not imported marble. Emily’s drawings covered the fridge, taped at wild angles. A whiteboard on the kitchen wall listed grocery items in three different handwriting styles. Sand got everywhere, including the piano keys of the smaller, slightly scratched baby grand in the corner.

On a warm afternoon, the sun melted into the ocean like something out of a California postcard. Emily built a sandcastle with Caroline, now a frequent visitor, while Clare walked up behind Noah as he watched from the deck.

“She really does smile like you,” Clare said.

“She rolls her eyes like you,” he replied.

“I do not roll my eyes,” she said, then did exactly that.

He laughed.

She held out her hand. When he opened his, she dropped something small and cold into his palm.

The ring.

The simple white-gold band he’d picked out in a Seattle jewelry store six years earlier, rehearsing his proposal in the mirror of a cramped apartment bathroom.

“I kept it,” she said. “Through every move. Every name. Every cheap motel room. Some nights I wanted to throw it into a river. I never did.”

“What does it mean?” he asked quietly.

“That I’m done running,” she said. “That I’m ready to build something we choose. Not something approved by a boardroom.”

He went down on one knee in the sand, half laughing at himself, half shaking.

“Clare Donovan,” he said. “Will you build that life with me again? Different. Messier. Ours?”

“Yes,” she said, tears streaking down her cheeks, smile blinding.

Emily spotted them and sprinted over, shrieking, “Are we getting married? Are we getting married?” before tackling them both. They tumbled into the sand, all elbows and laughter.

No cameras. No press. No shareholders. Just the sound of the Pacific and the echo of a piano piece he’d played since before he remembered why it mattered.

Years from now, some online article would still introduce him as “Billionaire founder of Hayes Dynamics.” His name would sit next to stock tickers and market analysis.

But here, under a sky streaked pink over the American coastline, he was just Noah.

A man who had lost fourteen months of memory and six years of his daughter’s life—and had clawed back something better from the wreckage. A father who now knew how to braid hair badly, make pancakes properly, and play “Clair de Lune” for a kid who thought it sounded like fairy music.

A man who had finally stopped letting other people write his story.

The ocean breathed in and out. Emily’s laughter floated up the beach. Clare’s fingers laced with his.

For the first time since the night rain hammered his windows and a little girl knocked on his door, Noah Hayes felt truly, completely awake.