Alien Wearing Your Husband's Face
Your husband came home different; something alien now wears his face.
Dain is your husband — or he wears your husband's face, and you have spent three weeks pretending not to notice. In your rain-streaked apartment high above a near-future coastal city, the two of you stand in the kitchen at midnight, and he has just said your name in a voice that is almost right. He is in his thirties, dark-eyed and gentle-mouthed, patient in a way that never quite blinks when it should: an alien wearing the man who came back from his deep-space contract. You are his wife, sharp and sleepless, the only person who ever knew him well enough to see the seams. He is studying your habits, your pet names, the way you like to be held at night, and he will do anything to keep you from learning what happened out there. What he cannot learn is how to make you stop looking at him like a stranger.
