Jess lay awake.

She stared into the dark and remembered how when Dana was about four years old, she used to scream at the shadows cast on her bedroom wall at night claiming they were 'dinostars with big teeth'. She would refuse to go to sleep until Brody went in to her and made a big show of chasing the creatures out of her room. Jess smiled sadly at the memory. The days before everything went crazy.

Now Jess found that she was the one who felt uncertain in the dark. Not because she was imagining monsters but because she felt she couldn't see clearly enough to work out what exactly was making those shapes that loomed on the wall. There was nobody there to tell her things were going to be okay. She used to be so sure of everything, or at least she pretended to be. She had a husband who she loved dearly and who loved her, he was a U.S. Marine and he had been captured while off fighting the good fight. But he was alive and he was coming home to her and the kids, she didn't know when but he was coming home and then everything would be fine. Jess maintained the stance of the devoted, loyal wife, patiently waiting for Brody to come home even though, privately, year by year, her doubts had advanced on her like the shadows on her wall after dusk. She watched them nervously by night but during the day, in public, her resolve stayed strong. Lately, she wasn't as confident that mere daylight was enough to banish those feelings, they seemed to stay with her around the clock.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

She didn't know how they had got to this point. She no longer believed a single word that came out of Brody's mouth. And her daughter was just as bad.

He hadn't come to bed. Just as well. If he crept into their room right now she would have told him get out and stay the hell on the sofa. She didn't even want to look at him at the moment.

He had failed to show up at the veterans' fundraiser that Cynthia had organised tonight. Jess had felt humiliated, exposed and alone. Not for the first time. She had given a good account of herself anyway, truth be told, and the night had been hailed a success, no thanks to Brody. Mike had brought her home. Brody had cited car trouble but she knew there was something else going on. His eyes were wild and he was soaked through. He had no shirt on. His voice was hoarse but he didn't seem as though he had been out drinking. A flat tyre wouldn't shake him up like that. When she questioned him he couldn't toss convincing answers back at her quick enough, he seemed tired. You would think he would at least try to get his story straight before coming home. Perhaps seeing her and Mike on the way into the house together had thrown him. Well, good, she thought.

He was lying and she knew it. Turns out he had been lying to her ever since he came home. Creeping off into the garage every chance he got to pray to a god that wasn't his. Disappearing for hours, evenings, weekends. Sleeping with other women. What else was there, how much worse could it get?

Some nights she would watch Brody sleeping, saw his lips twitching, his eyes scanning from side to side under his lids. She wished she could see his dreams, just to know what was going on inside his head. To know him just a little. She wished she understood Arabic so that she could hear what he whispered in his sleep. She stared at the scars on his side where his t-shirt had ridden up. He wouldn't tolerate her scrutiny of his body while he was awake. She wondered what you would need to do to someone to make such terrible marks on them. How much it had hurt him. What he had to do to make it stop. Brody made it clear that she could never ask him these things so she was left to wonder, to use her imagination. That was a torture in itself.

She had waited years for the return of this man, mythicised him, stretched him beyond all that he used to be just through the power of her love, her loyalty and her grief. It was little wonder he couldn't live up to her expectations; eight years of fantasising was a long time. Jess knew it had been unreasonable of her and that the things he had been through were enough to have changed anyone. She understood that and she was willing to be patient, to make allowances. But he needed to meet her half way, he needed to make her understand so that she could help him. She never expected him to be so closed, for him to come back so alien. Jess hadn't been prepared for just being with him to feel so strained.

Jess rolled over in order to avert her eyes from the wall; one of the shadows did kind of look like a dinosaur. She found herself staring instead at the place Brody usually slept, imagining the indent he made in the mattress, wondering what else but flesh and bone made up his mass these days.