Gene's not even sure if she's real, but when she sits down and puts her hand on his arm, it suddenly sinks in and everything goes from unreal to too, too real. Everything is immediate and present and it hurts like an arrow in his heart, and that's part of why he'd left, after all; this is what thinking does, this is grief, getting yanked out of a world that isn't to a world that is.

The world that is is a world without Tony.

He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and closes his eyes. He doesn't know what to say, either; he can't say a thing. If he had anything to say it'd be stopped by the fact that his throat was choked up by nothing.

Not nothing - choked up by absence.