Instead, a shadow fell across me. I looked up, and there stood Bonmot, staring down at me with a grim smile upon his lips. His face was grimy with soot or dirt. He had a long, shallow cut running down his left cheek. Bonmot, in that moment, looked invincible, even though he had become more vulnerable than I could then know. (Whose faith wouldn’t falter for at least a moment in the midst of such inexplicable carnage?)

His grim smile softened to concern as he saw the condition of my foot—or, rather, the lack of a foot.

“You’re alive,” I said, in wonder. By now, the lack of sleep, the terror of what I had gone through, had taken me somewhere else entirely.

“You need to see a doctor,” Bonmot said. He crouched down beside me, gently cupped his hand under my calf to better examine the wound.

“Not really,” I said. “There’s nothing to be done now. It’s mostly cauterized. I washed the rest of it. The flesh is clean. I spent all night with a mob of corpses in the Truffidian Cathedral. You may wish to investigate.”

He bowed his head, looking at my stump. “I know. I’ve heard. You were there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Pretending to be dead. Please, don’t worry about the leg.”

He stared at me. “Janice, you need to have it looked at anyway.”

I laughed, an edge of bitterness in my voice. “I suppose,” I said, “but who will look at it? I’ve been limping around this broken old city of ours all morning. And I’ve seen little that isn’t mangled, mashed, cracked, twisted, or dead.”

“It won’t take long to rebuild,” he said. “You’ll be surprised. All of this will be behind us someday.” A pause. “Have you heard from Mary?”

This, then, was the closest he could come to asking about Duncan.

“No, I haven’t,” I said.

(And you wouldn’t, not for a few days. I had returned Mary to our apartment, which had been ransacked but not ruined, and we took up again the unhealthy non-bliss of our domestic lives together—a little more silent around each other, a little more reserved, a little more distant. She became fond of saying I was “suffocating” her in those first few days after the war. I had no response. I needed comfort from her. I needed her.)

I started to cry. I was still talking, my face still set in a half-grimace, half-smile, but I was crying. “Sybel’s dead,” I said.

And then, even though he had a thousand responsibilities that day, Bonmot pulled me to him and held me as, sobbing, I told him about all of the dead.