The sleep specialist asks Iven to describe what happens. She says she wakes somewhere between 4:15 and 4:20, and cannot get back to sleep for an hour or more. The specialist asks if she has kept a log. Iven produces it: four years, documented in a notebook she bought for the purpose. The specialist looks at it for a moment. She says the consistency is unusual.
Iven agrees. She does not say what she knows about the consistency. She has decided to let them work through their hypotheses first. She has already been through chronotype adjustment, temperature protocols, light therapy, and something called sleep compression that had made everything considerably worse. She has one more hypothesis to offer and she is saving it.
She had noticed the window after about six months. She had been keeping the log at the specialist's request, and one evening she was reviewing it and she saw the number 4:17 recurring with enough regularity that she looked it up. Then she looked at her phone. She had not opened his contact in eight months. His last call was a Tuesday, 4:19 AM, from a time zone two hours behind.
She understood then what she was working with. It was not insomnia. It was not grief disruption, or not only that. It was the body maintaining its side of something. She has continued seeing sleep specialists because she does not know what else to do, and because saying this out loud would require her to decide whether she wants it to stop.
She lies there. The window is 4:17 to 4:20. She has stopped reaching for her phone.