“You came back,” he said.

She felt it. The warmth of his fingertip. The slight roughness of his callus.

“I’m nervous,” she heard herself say, but it wasn’t her eleven-year-old voice. It was her own, thirty-eight-year-old voice, cracked and raw.

That night, she laid the flannel shirt on her living room floor, placed the Hexa at its center, and sat cross-legged before it. She set her phone timer for 121 seconds. She closed her eyes and thought of her father’s hands—the way they smelled of sawdust and coffee, the way the knuckles had thickened with arthritis, the way he’d once caught a foul ball at a minor league game and given it to her as if it were the Holy Grail.

Step 4.1: The Anchor Object. Must be porous to the subject’s bio-resonance. Hair, dried blood, unwashed clothing. A photograph will not suffice.

She was eleven again, in the passenger seat of his old Ford Ranger. The vinyl seat was hot against her bare legs. The air smelled of gasoline and his cheap pine air freshener. He was there—fifty-two years old, graying at the temples, a small scar on his chin from a bicycle accident in 1987. He was laughing.

She had his old flannel shirt in a vacuum-sealed bag at the back of her closet. The one he wore when he taught her to drive. She’d never washed it.