“Good. Pay attention. From now on, I will be pronouncing the word ‘what’ as ‘HWOT.’ It sounds more professional.”

“Hwot,” said Rose.

“Very good. ‘That’s hwot you think,’ said Ivy. ‘I’m getting really good at escaping.’ ”

Lawrence finished the chapter, and, for once, neither he nor Rose protested as Compton tucked them in and kissed them. Baby Walter had stone-cold passed out in Compton’s arms and had not awoken during the perilous transfer to his crib, a small miracle. Trepidatiously, she patted him on his diapered, pajamaed bottom, which stuck up in the air. As the door shut behind her, she expected some delayed squall to erupt, but all was silent.

The kitchen glowed with the eerie LED under-counter lights Ellis had insisted upon installing. Rooting around in the cabinet, Compton extracted a bottle of Malbec—too good to drink alone, but what the hell—and uncorked it. She carried a glass to the study. Curling into the fat, cushioned reading chair, she wrapped herself in a worn chenille blanket, flipped open her laptop, and clicked on her news app. She had an hour to kill before the Zoom with all her girlfriends, and mindless wine-fueled web surfing seemed as appealing a way as any to spend it. You had to do something to keep your mind off things.

Work had a tendency to creep into her thoughts, regardless of what she did. Example A: her shift three days ago. Less than six months into the pandemic, the bread-and-butter cases of an emergency department once again dominated her shifts—chest pain, abdominal pain, fractures; not to mention the predictably unpredictable shit that showed up on every shift, like erections that would not resolve and little kids who’d eaten batteries and some dude who’d managed to lodge a fishhook in his eye. Who fooled around casting fishhooks in the middle of Manhattan?

There was always one case from every shift that stuck with her, depositing a tiny seed of anxiety in her mind. The anxiety seed would bide its time before sprouting into a full-fledged horticultural horror, coiling ugly tendrils of panic around the sulci and gyri of her brain, worming its way from her subconscious into her conscious mind until she could think of nothing else. She’d had a bit of a tendency to obsess over cases gone wrong before ART, but now—now she did it every day, even over cases where nothing had gone wrong. The what-ifs would not leave her alone.

This time it had been a young mother, a twenty-eight-year-old named Rosita Sosa. Rosita was a knockout; the perfect planes of her face drew the surreptitious eye of every man in the department; they’d glance at her, do a double take, and then look away as if they had pressing business on the other side of the ER. Helpless fools. Rosita Sosa didn’t notice. Rosita Sosa had lost her mind.