Cover

TITLES BY KIMMERY MARTIN

The Queen of Hearts

The Antidote for Everything

Doctors and Friends

NOTE TO THE READER:

The writing of this novel preceded COVID-19 and therefore there is no mention of the real-life pandemic. In this fictional universe, it does not exist.

Dedication

For Casey, Christina, Jill, Kelli, Kristin, and Whitney. I love you.

Epigraph

To everything there is a season,

A time for every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born,

And a time to die;

A time to plant,

And a time to pluck what is planted;

A time to kill,

And a time to heal

—Ecclesiastes 3:1–3

CHARACTER SPECIALTIES

Dr. Kira Marchand

Infectious Disease

Atlanta, Georgia

Dr. Candee Compton-Winfield

Emergency Medicine

New York, New York

Dr. Hannah Geier

Obstetrics & Gynecology

San Diego, California

(also in The Queen of Hearts)

Dr. Georgia Brown

Urology

San Diego, California

(also in The Antidote for Everything and The Queen of Hearts)

Dr. Vani Darshana

Internal Medicine

Berea, Kentucky

Dr. Zadie Anson

Pediatric Cardiology

Charlotte, North Carolina

(also in The Queen of Hearts)

Dr. Emma Colley

Trauma Surgery

Charlotte, North Carolina

(also in The Queen of Hearts)

ALSO FEATURING:

Dr. Jonah Tsukada

Family Medicine

San Diego, California

(also in The Antidote for Everything)

PART ONE

AFTER ARTIOVIRUS

1

This Thing’s About to Blow

KIRA

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

One balmy evening near the end of a balmy winter, A man sidled up to me in a corner of an Atlanta mansion.

He had a request.

Before I go into detail about the repellent nature of the man’s proposal, I should temper your expectations. I know very well how my voice comes across in person, let alone in the recounting of a history. I have a sense of humor, but it’s sometimes mistaken for condescension. Similarly, to my dismay, my sense of compassion during tragedy has occasionally been misinterpreted as judgment. Throughout a mass calamity in which millions of people died, we were hobbled by fear and grief and hardship and isolation, yes; but at the same time, we learned humanity is resilient beyond all reckoning. We shared a mutual hope. Women still gave birth, nurturing tiny new humans first inside and then outside their bodies. We still created art and music and literature. Our scientists continued to innovate, our doctors to heal, our educators to teach.

On a lighter note, we still extracted comedy from tragedy, finding new ways to laugh at ourselves. We swapped pandemic jokes. We watched late-night comedy routines. We captured funny snapshots, wrote pithy quips about them, and flung them into cyberspace. If a society can’t meme itself out of a disaster, what hope is there?

But this is not our collective story as a society. This is my story—and also Compton’s story and Hannah’s story and a little bit of Georgia’s story—and it represents the most difficult circumstances of our lives. For my portion, you’re stuck with my voice, such as it is.