It's a little surreal, to know that amidst all this strangeness and displacement, he and Grace are so close in origin that she'd heard about his expedition when it set off. She wonders when he was born, how close they are in age. For a moment she says nothing, and then she turns back into the house to take the pot off the stove. The snow has melted now, not yet boiling, and so she lifts it back outside, carrying it resting against the bustle of fabric on her hip.

"I was very young when I first heard about it all, and in the years since I've not had much access to newspapers." She sets the pot down in the snow next to the body, and because she has something else to occupy her mind with, it's easier to see it not as a person but as a thing, an object – mostly because it's as if she's not really seeing it at all. "But I do recall much being made of a disappearance."