My Wife Returned Young Again After a Ten-Year Business Trip

A man has spent ten years apart from his wife, Lena, who took an overseas posting a year after their marriage. She was always frail, with severe stomach problems and a weak constitution, yet the woman who has now returned to him is healthy, energetic, and changed in ways he cannot explain.

At the East Side Police Station, Officer Miller tells him of an earlier case: an old man named Miller reported that his daughter, once a gambling, hard-drinking drop-out with severe asthma, came back years later transformed, able to discuss classic literature and carry a hundred-pound bag of rice. Days after the police found nothing wrong, the old man and his daughter vanished, leaving clothes, savings passbook and ID behind. Two years on, there is still no news.

Told to move out, avoid being alone with his wife, and record everything on a small black voice recorder, the man walks home through the cold November night. The lights of their sixth-floor flat are on, and the table is full of food.