As sedatives coursed through his flesh, Van read his wife’s electronic sentences over and over. For the first time in his life, he could literally hear Dottie’s spoken voice behind her blurry pixels. Van thumbed his way back to the top of the screen again. Some indescribable comfort was seeping into him. In real life, Dottie would not have repeated the same consoling words to him, over and over again, one hundred slow, blurry times. A man in a hospital needed that.