"Oh." He looked down, nodding like a child who'd just been told that their mother or father wasn't coming home. Like they understood and could handle it when the reality was that they didn't, and they couldn't.
Cole knew that Sam was telling the truth. It went against reason and rationality, but so did ghosts and foggy power outages. Somehow his friend managed to do the unthinkable, something that no human being should ever have the power to do... it wasn't worth it, coming back from the dead, if it was just going to end like this.
He kept the anger to himself, the burning heat that simmered beneath his pain and his sorrow. The machine needed to be destroyed, but if it could take away Jude's pain then that needed to happen first. He couldn't stand to see her like that, and as badly as he wanted to believe that there was a way to fix her, he knew there wasn't.
"She knew," he said quietly, his gaze still kept downward. "She left me a note - a lot of them, actually - saying that she thought she was dying." A strangled sob caught in his throat. "She thought we were getting married. I..." He couldn't continue. Instead he turned away and made his way back to the couch, kneeling beside it. Jude didn't look like Jude anymore, but she was still making those terrible noises. He took her hand in his, not caring that her skin peeled away and felt rotten next to his own.