Compton had always hated this clock, although she’d long since become accustomed to its noise. Now, though, she couldn’t bear to part with it, or the Roomba vacuums either. If Ellis had been buried, she’d have considered burying him with the oldest and frailest of the Roombas so he’d have something to tinker with in the afterlife, but, like most victims of the ART virus in the city, he’d been cremated without so much as a funeral. Instead, she’d boxed up all the Roombas except the newest one, and shoved them into their bay in the building’s basement. The smallest one she’d bequeathed to Lawrence, who carried it around all day like a doll. He even slept with it.

Compton dreaded the day stretched before her, with its endless minute-by-minute clock flips. She didn’t have anything to do until nine o’clock tonight, when her girlfriends had scheduled a Zoom. She didn’t have to work today. In fact, since the numbers of infected in New York had begun to fall over the past few months, she now had one or two or even three days off every week.

During the months she’d been killing herself at work, she’d at least been able to block the specter of her grief. Inside the hospital, the urgency of saving as many other lives as she could provided the ultimate distraction, and at home, her exhaustion overwhelmed her. She’d never in her life slept as deeply and as dreamlessly as she had during those weeks.

Here, now, surrounded by all of Ellis’s things, in their home, in his bed, with his children, there was no escape. She’d given Mildred three days off, exhausted by the effort of having to hide her grief. The late-fall weather, as if ordered up by a vengeful god, matched the mood of the city: bleak and gray and unseasonably frigid, enough so that being outdoors provided little respite. Her pain, massive and all-consuming, never left her alone for an instant. For the first time ever, she understood why sometimes people could not cry.

A tiny rustling sounded at her bedroom door. Inch by inch, the door swung open, so hesitatingly that at first she thought she must be imagining it. But no: after a minute or so the dim light from her bedroom window illuminated a rectangular patch of hallway floor.

A small, indistinct shadow stood outside the patch of light. With agonizing slowness, Lawrence inched into view. First one foot, then the curved grip of a hand on the doorframe, then a sliver of his cheek. Over the course of the next five minutes he tiptoed across the room and eased himself and the remaining Roomba onto the foot of the bed, then repeated the whole painstaking process of oozing his way up to the empty pillow beside Compton, where he placed the Roomba beside him, before gradually, ever-so-slowly lowering his head down. He then spent the next five minutes scooting backward in tiny increments until he’d nestled himself against her. Finally, after another few minutes, he let out a long sigh and his breathing again became regular.