“Be fair. It’s generally okay unless I overexert myself. And I’ve tried hard to be careful—”

“Let me finish,” she said. “I’m not accusing you of being cavalier with your health. But you are determined. Protective. When the stakes are high for the things you care about, you tend to push yourself further than you should. Over the last few weeks, you’ve taken how many vaccines? Yellow fever, typhoid, diphtheria, hepatitis A. And I’m sure there are some that slip my mind right this instant. Any one of them can have side effects on people whose immune systems never took anything close to the blows yours did.”

“Ash, you said it yourself. It’s been two years since I got sick.”

“You didn’t just get sick,” she said. “You were almost murdered with a biological weapon, deliberately infected with a virus nobody had ever seen before. A strain grown in a laboratory by a process so sophisticated government scientists are still incredulous.” She paused and waved a hand toward the window. “Whoever created that germ, whoever tried to kill you, is still out there somewhere. We don’t talk about it much these days, I think because you know how it worries me. Maybe we should, though. It’s not a trifling detail we can ignore because it’s convenient.”

Gordian stood there feeling her gaze on him.

“Our marriage is my proudest achievement, what I care about more than anything,” he said. “But I’ve never made you a promise I couldn’t keep, and I won’t now.”

Ashley folded her arms across her chest and gave him a little shrug.

“Then how about trying to make one you can,” she said.

Gordian watched her a while without saying anything. Then he strode across the room, came close in front of her, and put his hands on her shoulders.

“I’ll think about what you’re asking,” he said. “Give me until I come back from Africa, and you’ll have my answer. I don’t know if that does anything to make you worry less. But I want you to feel easier.”

She looked at him, then nodded, her eyes overbright.

“It’s a start, Roger,” she said. “It’s a start.”

There was soft music coming from the jukebox at Nate’s, a saloon on San Diego’s east side that was an exhausted but tenacious holdout against the pressures of neighborhood gentrification, something that also could have been said of the battered rowhouses shouldered around it on the street like allies in a neglected, fading cause.

Tom Ricci and Derek Glenn sat in a mustard-colored booth toward the back, Ricci sipping a Coke loaded with ice, Glenn drinking imported stout from the bottle and taking long hits on a Marlboro in violation of a clean air law the gray-haired barkeep had resolutely disavowed as unconstitutional, or if not that, then at least undeserving of constitutionality. The four or five other people spaced out along the bar were representative of his dwindling client base, which was almost exclusively male, black, working class, and on the far downhill side of retirement age.