“Can’t I at least talk to him?” she asked. “Just to let him know I’m here?”

He was right there, after all. Just a window away, a speaker in the wall away, after years of being so far gone that all they could tell her was that the math was complicated. They had no numbers yet for the distance between worlds, between one reality and another.

She had felt it all, lying in bed without him next to her. And now he was there, so close to here, sitting ramrod straight and still on a chair in that sterile little room. Half-lost in the lank, oily hair and beard he must not have so much as trimmed in all that time, so thin she could have broken just looking at him, but there.

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” the woman who’d been keeping her on that side of the window all morning said, sympathy as fake as her eyelashes. “Your husband has been through an very traumatic experience. Extraplanar excursions are usually limited to twelve hours or less, in large part because of the mental strain they place on the traversing agents. We-”

“You lost him.” Lying in bed alone, she’d dreamed – awake and asleep – of screaming it at them. Loudly enough for the whole world to hear, and then they would have to do something, pay for it somehow, even if nothing could ever have repaid her for him.

But she hadn’t. She had kept quiet, kept taking their pity money, hush money, because saying they had lost him would have been the same as admitting they couldn’t get him back.

“You lost him over there for three fucking years,” she said now, not a scream to shatter all their pretty pretenses, but clenched brittle between his teeth. “And now you’re telling me he’s too traumatized to need his wife there to support him? To need some fucking comfort, not just-”

“Not at all,” the woman lied, breathy-sweet, sickly sweet as a nun watching over dying soldiers. “That isn’t what I meant. Your husband is…his case has no precedent. We have no concrete understanding of how such prolonged exposure to a fundamentally different reality might affect the human mind. So far, he’s shown no sign of even being aware of the doctors in the room. He reacts – violently, sometimes – to things that are invisible, if not nonexistent.”

Chill as glass, as close to breaking, she stared in at the man she had last seen walking out their apartment door with that damn coat, the one she’d always teased him about, slung over one shoulder. Relic of a defunct hockey team from an equally defunct town – he still wore it, in tatters, holding tight to its lapels.

“You’re telling me he’s lost his mind?” she asked.

“That’s a- no,” the woman said. “That’s a simplistic way of describing a vast array of phenomena. We prefer to think of it this way. The average person, placed in a pitch-black cave, will begin to hallucinate within hours. They aren’t losing their minds – their senses are just struggling to adapt to a changed environment. The same is most likely true here. Nothing on those alternate planes functions the way that human bodies, human senses, expect. He’s had three years to adapt and, miraculously, survive. It could be that this world of ours is what seems incomprehensible to him now. To him, we may be the invisible things.”

He’d told her so little about his work. Wanted her to know so little. Maybe that had been so she could tease him about his jacket and suggest they order in that night instead of worrying for him. His eyes, the same melting wells of brown as ever, flicked about as if focusing on things between him and the white walls, and seemed as though they could so easily have focused on her.

“Then…he’ll get better, won’t he?” she asked. “He’ll adapt again?”

“That’s our hope,” the woman confirmed. “And you will most likely be a part of that process. But you have to understand how delicate the situation is. We have no way of knowing yet what stimuli might be normal to us but upsetting or even harmful to him. If you consent, we’ll house you on-site for the duration of his recovery. And as soon as we can be confident that it’s safe for both of you…you’re right that you might be the person most capable of helping him readjust.”

It all still sounded like hush money, lies and pity. A way to keep her from running to the press or the best lawyer their money could buy. But with him just a window away, how could she say no? How could she leave him that way, glancing around the room like a man surrounded, circled by wolves in the dark?

She swallowed the lump of seeing him that way, of standing on the wrong side of the window. The wrong side of his senses. It wouldn’t be forever – if he had been strong enough to survive that way, he had to be strong enough to come back from it. Soon enough, he would look into her eyes again. Smile that awkward little smile she had seen every night while trying to fall asleep, and say he was sorry for being gone so long.

She would tell him it was all right – they could still order in. A little laughter, a few tears, and life would go on, with all the rightfully invisible things left in the past where they belonged.