“Hello?” said the woman. An Irish voice. I felt my eyes fill.

“This is Kira,” I managed.

“I’m Sarah MacGuire, Declan’s sister.” She must have heard my intake of breath, and she spoke quickly, before I could ask. “He’s alive.”

A beat, to give me time to absorb this. Then: “He’s been sick, though. Went straight to the ICU in hospital, and I’m awfully sorry we weren’t able to call you right away. His lab closed down when a number of the researchers got sick, and they’ve still not reopened.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s still on the ventilator, as of today. But the doctors say”—she took a deep breath—“they say he’s young and healthy and he’s got a decent shot of making it. And of course we can’t even see him. We can’t get into Spain, or out of Ireland for that matter, not that I’d let Mam go anywhere at a time like this.”

“But you’ve got his phone,” I said.

“Yes.” A rustling in the background and then a tiny voice: a child. Sarah must have muted herself, because all the noise vanished momentarily. Then she came back: “Sorry. Yes, well, not his phone. I’ve got his tablet. Declan asked one of the nurses to send it to us, just before they intubated him. He put a list on it—contacting lab mates with instructions and so forth—but unfortunately, he failed to send us the lock code. I’ve only just figured it out.” She took a breath. “There’s a message to you.”

I waited.

“It says”—the plinky little tick of an iPad’s keyboard—“it says . . .” She paused. “Uh, I don’t— Maybe I shouldn’t have— Is it okay if I send this to you instead?”

“Of course,” I said. Perhaps Declan had proposed again. Perhaps the last thing he’d wanted me to know was that he still loved me.

A minute later, it was there, in my phone; blazing-hot black type on a white screen, maybe the last words I’d ever hear from Declan MacGuire. I read them and read them again, and then I clicked the email closed, but not before they’d burned their way into my brain. I could see them when I closed my eyes.

Kiki. About the gonorrhea: It was Sean, my other mate, we got it from. Hand to my heart.

Out of nowhere, I burst out crying.

—

WALLY DIDN’T APPEAR to notice my distraction as I joined him in the hall. Or maybe he did but attributed my blotchy face to one of the random grief attacks afflicting pretty much everybody at one time or another these days. He pointed down the hall, in the direction of the new videoconference suite. “Come,” he said. “I was about to dive into the team reports.”

We worked for a few hours, reading data aggregates from various sources. Wally, who refused to read on a screen, trundled back and forth from the conference room to the printer in his office. In short order, he’d accumulated a monstrous stack of stapled articles, one of which he flicked down the table in my direction. “You seen this?”