By all accounts, his illness had clobbered him with the ferocity and rapidity of a meteor strike. His doctors had promised—perhaps a bit too ardently—that he had never fully regained consciousness. When she thought about it—when she could bear to think about it—she’d focused on this timeline as the only small blessing amid the tragedy of losing him. He had not known he’d died alone.

She couldn’t remember: in that final call, had she said she loved him?

Surely she had.

She wrenched her attention to her laptop. Ignoring all the articles related to the virus, she scrolled down with one thumb, the wineglass gripped in her other hand. She glanced at a story about some celebrity’s dislike of some other celebrity—really, who cared?—and skimmed one of those Twitter compilations of amusing social failures. Even in the midst of catastrophe, people were still drunk-texting the wrong hookup, creatively misspelling public signs, and succumbing to atrocious hairstyle mishaps. Reassuring in a life-goes-on sort of way, but even other people’s funny fuckups failed to hold her interest for long. She scrolled farther down the feed before sitting up straight to transfer the Malbec to a side table.

She’d already passed the headline that had caught her eye, so she had to scroll back up. There. In bold font: The Last Days of Dr. Aboubakar Seidou: The World’s Patient Zero. Compton scanned the introductory paragraph. The Moroccan authorities had identified the man who’d died on the Tarifa ferry a week or so before she and her friends had boarded the same ill-fated boat. He’d been a physician in Central Africa, but he’d had a journal on his person at the time of his death, and somehow the press had gotten hold of it.

The author of the piece, a freelance reporter in Spain, had written a serialized, semi-fictionalized account of the final weeks of Dr. Seidou’s life, based on his journal writing and media reports. This last installment detailed his final hours in Tangier. Compton began reading it in a hungry gulp.

To put it mildly, she was not unacquainted with the effects of the ART virus. She’d survived a mild course of the illness herself. She’d read dozens if not hundreds of papers about it, and she’d treated dozens if not hundreds of patients with it, some of them moderately affected and some who had died. Some of her colleagues had died, heading into patient rooms time and time again, aware of the odds of dying themselves and forging ahead nonetheless in the time-honored tradition of healers.

And, of course: Ellis.

And yet. Throughout all this immersive exposure to the artiovirus and its effects, she’d never contemplated such an in-depth perspective of someone else’s experience. The author of the article attempted to place himself in the mind of Dr. Seidou as he became ill, weaving together an omniscient point of view with the doctor’s perspective, resulting in an oddly lyrical ode to a man who’d died without ever realizing his death would change the face of the planet.