“That,” I said, “is my motherfucking point.”

The guards were standing over by the door. I motioned to them.

“Come on with me,” I said. “The minute I find that extra food and water, I want her out of here. I’ll need your help.”

The people guarding the front door came toward me cautiously. A few people’s faces in the lobby had shifted to looks of confusion and hesitation.

“Makayla,” Jaden said. The disgust on his face was gone, replaced by the kind, sensitive person I had known all my life. A person who had sympathy for both Drusilla and me. I loved him so much right then. But I knew he was wrong. So I pushed that love somewhere away, somewhere I push all the things in my head that don’t keep me moving forward. “Don’t do this.”

“I have to,” I said softly.

He shook his head again from side to side. “When you get back up to our apartment, I’ll be gone. I’m going to stay in an empty one. I don’t think things are working out between us.”

My anger flared up in me again. I felt like punching something, maybe him this time. I clenched my fists and held them at my side. He saw me and just stood there, ready for whatever was going to come.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s not working out. I just need things to stay good for all of us.”

He listened to the words passed from person to person on street corners, in looted stores, in the lines waiting for the meager food handouts from the government. In one such line, two old women spoke about the angels they had once seen.

“I was in the hospital once, long before all this,” said a woman bent over a cane to the woman standing next to her. They were both old, both had white hair and dark skin, dark eyes and lips painted over false teeth despite how the world was falling apart around them. “I was hooked up to a machine and it was beeping, beeping, beeping, until suddenly that beep became a trumpet, a song out of the heavens. Standing there was an angel, all in white robes with the face of my daughter who died when she was just a teenager. She stood there telling me that everything would be fine, that even if I let go of this life—and she told me it was my choice to let go or stay—but if I did let go, there was a kingdom waiting for me. All I had to do was believe. I told her I wanted to stay, that I wanted to be with her again, but there was my boys and their babies left here, and I had to stay for them. Then the trumpet became a beeping again, and I was back in the hospital. That’s how I know there’s more than this life, more than this struggle,” she said. “That’s how I know that there’s something waiting for us all after this.”