I want to explain now, in full, exactly what investigators and, eventually, Vera herself pieced together about what had actually happened on that rural highway ten years ago — a reconstruction that took considerable time and multiple specialists to fully assemble once the truth finally began emerging.
Vera had, in fact, survived the initial crash, though with severe injuries including significant head trauma that resulted in both a period of unconsciousness and, once she eventually woke, profound retrograde amnesia affecting her memory of not just the accident itself, but a considerable portion of her identity and personal history preceding it. She’d apparently been thrown partially clear of the vehicle during the crash, landing in dense brush considerably down the embankment from where the car itself came to rest and eventually caught fire — a specific, narrow margin of physical separation that had saved her life while also, devastatingly, placing her outside the area investigators had thoroughly searched once the fire made full recovery of the vehicle’s presumed occupant impossible.
A passing motorist, a man named Gerald Finch, discovered Vera roughly two hours after the crash, unconscious and severely injured but alive, in the brush below the highway — a discovery investigators would only fully piece together a decade later, once Vera’s returning memory and subsequent investigation established the actual sequence of events.
