Just got in, she says. A referral meeting overran. Thought I’d better get dinner on the go.

Something is different about her hair. She has put it up, like she used to do, in the old days, but the wind has been at it. Ruffled it.

Well? she says.

He hasn’t looked at her legs for a very long time, but there they are, sticking out of the bottom of her coat. There is dirt on her tights.

I don’t know, says Logan. I’ll have to see. Did you fall over or something?

She looks where he is looking. Brushes her knees, Yes. Tripped in the car park. Stupid really.

She changes before they eat. She has brushed her teeth too: he catches a whiff of the arctic coldness of mint. He watches her eyelashes fluttering at the food, at the salt cellar, at the tablecloth; landing repeatedly on her environment but never on him. Now that she has mentioned it, he is having trouble with the Anesthine. He looks at her; something registers in him, and whatever he was about to think is washed away. He is constantly blanked by her presence. Whatever document his brain is trying to write, Anesthine is holding down the backspace key.

After dinner, he excuses himself from a romantic comedy she wants to stream, and takes himself to his study. Tucked behind his small run of Jung, the journal he has kept, from time to time, ever since his training. Some problems need talking out, and those that cannot be spoken aloud will sometimes submit to a page. He begins.

The drug is doing its work. But what is underneath? I cannot approach it.

Jules—

The sentence won’t finish. The words won’t come.

After an hour he rejoins his wife for the end of the movie. He cannot tell if he might have enjoyed it, even against his critical judgement, because he feels nothing. The film ends and she drifts upstairs. He drifts after her.

I think I may cut down the dose, he says to her back, as she is cleaning her teeth again. Of the Anesthine.

His wife is intensely focused on the enamel gleam of the sink. She makes an okay noise through a mouthful of foam.

Jules lies in the dark and imagines the sleeping body beside her is Donal’s. She turns Logan’s desert chest into Donal’s unruly forest; Logan’s too-sad-to-eat waist into Donal’s pulpy white belly. Yes, she knows something of his body.