"I'm sorry. For your loss," Julia says with a small, bittersweet smile of her own, one that's understanding rather than pitying. "And I don't mean to pry. It's... My husband died a year and a half ago. So some of that sounded, well, familiar." Having been through it, she thinks, it's easier to tell when others have as well, not least when so many of her songs have been about Michael, or about trying to move on after his death. Trying to try to, maybe. For a little while, she thought maybe she was getting there, but showing up here has changed all of that, taken away the chance she might eventually have had with someone else.

That thought, she buries as quickly as she can. The rest, though, is simpler under circumstances like these. She's always hated being a war widow, with how people look at her when they find out and how she's supposed to feel about it, but it's different with someone who's been in a similar position. A disappearance can't be too unlike a death. For her, in a way, Michael did just disappear, anyway, gone somewhere on the other side of the world, her whole life changing in one intangible blow.

"I've written about it, some. I guess it's all you can do, isn't it?"