As though she’d summoned him, Ellis drifted into her thoughts. They’d spoken for the last time while she was marooned in a hotel room in Spain, waiting out her mandatory isolation period so she could return home. In their conversations during those days, they fixated on how to respond to the emerging new reality: should they pull their money from the market? A few people had turned up with the mysterious new illness in New York; should they pull Lawrence and Rose from school? Stockpile supplies? Cancel meetings? Over the last few days, they’d discussed these matters with only a slight undertone of fear. By this point it was clear Compton was okay. Her friends had recovered or had not gotten sick. Even Vani, the only one to be hospitalized, gave every indication of a full recovery. Perhaps the man on the boat and the handful of others who’d died had been aberrations. Perhaps the illness would not spread widely. The world had only just embarked on its inexorable path to chaos, and neither of them yet appreciated how bad things would get.

Ellis—whose remaining life span at that point clocked in somewhere under that of the common mayfly—had called for the last time just as she’d been about to step in the shower. There had been no indication of the momentousness of the occasion. In fact, by now reassured of Compton’s health, he sounded upbeat.

“California lo-ove!” Ellis was no rapper—this went without saying—but lack of ability had never dimmed his enthusiasm for any form of song. Compton had to hold the phone a couple of inches away from her ear. “Hey, El.”

“City of Compton! Ba-da-da-dum-dum-dum . . .”

“What’s up?”

He broke off. “Nothing. Just missing you.”

“Can you put the kids on too?”

A sheepish tone crept in. “I’m at work. I’ve been going in to help wrap things up.”

“Oh, Ellis.” She hesitated, uncertain of what to say. They had agreed not to discuss the life-upheaval-move-to-the-country thing until they could do it in person, so for now they remained in a weird state of limbo. Ellis had given notice at his job. Meanwhile, she’d been detained in a foreign country, which was causing no small amount of consternation at her hospital. An ER doctor going AWOL for three weeks created hardship for the other doctors, who had to make up her shifts. Everything was a mess.

“I know, I know. I just wanted to hear your voice for a minute.”

“I’m about to jump in the shower. Why don’t you call me later when you’re home with the kids?”

That was it. A few hours later, he’d seized, and a few hours after that, he’d died. Oh, the irony of it: she’d been smack-dab in the middle of Viral Ground Zero and yet here she sat, her brain whirring and her nerve endings fizzing, her lungs expanding and contracting, her heart ticking with metronomic regularity. Ellis had had one fifteen-minute meeting with a woman who’d recently returned from a work trip to Europe, and now the only things remaining of him were memories and a pile of ash.