empathy with no words and no reply — "feel an odd chilled empathy he…"

The one act of contact Gately manages here is entirely mute and entirely one-way: through a sooty window, unseen, he watches a catatonic woman touch a tree in the dark and feels a chilled empathy he cannot say and she cannot receive. It is connection stripped to the last thing left when speech is impossible, a reaching toward a person who will never know she was reached toward, routed through glass and silence and a grief about his own mother he would rather not name.