Was that it? She didn’t want to go back? Her heart thundering, Hannah focused as hard as she could on Compton’s words. Yes: now it sounded clearer as she repeated the phrase over and over, gasping it like someone was beating it out of her. “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back.”

Hannah’s longing to burst through the computer screen into Compton’s New York apartment and wrap her arms around her friend was so intense it caused her actual physical discomfort. She doubled forward as her breath caught, lodged in the center of her chest as if it had been pinned by an ice pick through her sternum.

Compton’s sobs abated. She lowered her hands, her expression a mixture of shame and hopelessness. After a few beats, her head tilted and her eyes shifted. She reached a hand toward the screen. “Hannah, no,” she said.

Puzzled, Hannah regarded her own rectangular image box on the screen. Her reflection stared back, tears streaming down its face. She watched her own shoulders shaking as she reached a hand back toward the warm screen, as if she could lace her fingers through Compton’s. They left their hands there for a moment, blocking their faces from view.

“Don’t cry, Hannah,” whispered Compton.

But now tears coursed from everyone’s eyes, even Jonah’s. The screen had filled with hands, the crinkled lines of their palms in extreme close-up, the closest they could get to holding one another until the world righted itself again. All these months of fear and suffering and responsibility; all this devastation, medical and economic and societal. Contrary to popular wisdom, it didn’t feel good to cry. It felt exhausting and helpless, this pointless and biologically mysterious phenomenon of leaking clear fluid from your eyes in times of distress. Hannah had tried as much as possible to stay positive throughout it all, afraid a wash of negative emotion could somehow transform itself into a biochemical message and affect her child. But now, just like the rest of them, she let loose.

After an indeterminate period of time, they settled down, everyone emitting sighs and hiccups, wiping their faces on whatever was handy. A heavy calm descended. Perhaps that was the point of crying, Hannah thought: to numb you.

“Well, that was intense,” said Georgia finally. “Everybody okay?”

“No,” said Compton, and then her voice broke into a low-pitched hacking sound finally recognizable as a laugh. “But at least you guys are fucked-up right alongside me. It’s comforting, in a weird way, watching you cry with me.”

“A time to weep and a time to laugh,” said Hannah. Her face went still as she remembered that laughter gave way to mourning in the next line of the biblical verse.

Zadie, however, picked up the thread and spun it in a positive direction. “Also,” she said, “a time to heal.”