Author's Note: Tell me how you interpret the last line. I'm curious.
Dissolve
When he first sees her at the asylum, he can scarcely recognize her. She is changed, and she looks different to his eyes, and he can hardly recognize her by her mannerisms and her way of saying things and moving. She moves much differently now, reminding him much of a small mouse crossing a street where carriages pass and have no concern for what might lie in the path of their wheels. When at last they are on their way, she is more recognizeable, but he still feels as though she has lost something. He blames himself for only seeing a fraction of what she saw. He blames himself for not being able to hold her, to heal her, to understand why she shakes when she walks and why her eyes dart about like the tail of a horse who is flicking off flies.
A few months and he has ceased to know her. The eyes that glimmered at the prospect of Paris, of a honeymoon in Spain, of freedom now only stare past him with a thick film over them. She is always in thought, he notes, and he knows that she is thinking of Fogg's. He watches her remember, and he can almost read her thoughts like a book through her twitches, her grimaces, her absent-minded gestures, but there are pages missing. There are things- there are horrors that he cannot comprehend.
He has began to doubt her. Perhaps she has always been this way, and being among others like her only brought it out in her more. Could that place turn a sane man mad? Perhaps, but he still doubts. They rarely talk. She sits in the parlor and sews, and it's always thick canvas for sails. He no longer knows her, yet he still knows she is strong-willed and would still not sew what ladies are expected to sew. He watches her hands pull the needle through the thick cloth, and when she pricks her finger she hardly winces. She has done this so many times that it is alarming, and the cloth has small red dots in numerous places. She is distant, and he still does not know her, but he remembers her, and that is the best way to put it.
She comes to him sometimes, when it is night, or when it is dark due to storm, or when the twitching and shuddering and remembering has intensified to a point she cannot go past. He holds her, cradles her, strokes her hair and tells her that everything will be alright. He knows that this may very well be a blatant lie, but he longs to comfort her. It occurs to him that his role in her life is much changed, and he is now more parent than lover. Which does not surprise him when he thinks of what little love her life had once held.