"Oh, Alice," he says again, his heart breaking for her. "Rust and ruin, how awful." He squeezes her hand again, once again wrangling down the urge to offer her more physical comfort.

"And you've never had any chance to process through what happened in a healthy way, have you?" It's mostly a rhetorical question-- he knows enough about the world she's come from to know that no one offered her any grief counseling or post-traumatic debriefing therapy. He looks away, eyes closing. "Did you get any help at all? From anyone?"