“It’s beautiful, honey,” she said. She was looking at the gleaming golden slats of the crib as she spoke, and so she missed most of whatever expression Harry’d been initially wearing as he contemplated her. She swung her glance toward him in time to watch his smile melt. From there, his face slackened into free fall, bottoming out in a dull, frozen dread.

“Harry, what is it?” Her fingers gripped the doorframe harder. Suddenly, it was difficult to stand.

Harry crossed the room in two strides, reaching her as her legs gave way. He eased her over to the little daybed where she’d planned to breastfeed the baby, setting her up against a mound of ivory pillows. Her entire back had transformed into a rigid sheet of pain, screaming in protest as she tried to lean against the bed. “My back hurts,” she said. Her voice came out faint.

“Let me see your hands,” said Harry. If her voice had weakened, his had grown coarse and loud with fear. She lifted her hands, puzzled, and Harry snatched them up, covering them with his own hands so she couldn’t see them.

“No, no, no,” said Harry, letting her hands drop. He stood up and sat back down and stood up again, both hands pressed to the sides of his head. Slowly, Hannah looked down.

It took a moment to register. The tips of her fingers had turned a faint but sickening blue, the ugly marker of cyanosis, which was itself the ugly marker of a disease characterized by a lack of sufficient oxygen. Along with everyone else in her medical school, Hannah had learned the term cyanosis in the first year of classes, a time they spent largely parked in lecture hall seats, but she’d never before considered the etymological underpinnings of the word. In retrospect, cyan was obvious; it referred to the color blue, in this case the unnatural bluish hue of skin deprived of its core fuel. Osis, a suffix derived from Latin, denoted a pathological state.

Blue. Pathology.

Blue pathology.

A whimper escaped her. The sight of her hands seemed to have punctured her core, dismantling some protective inner shield and unleashing a host of physical pain. A symphony of symptoms cascaded into her awareness: the large muscles of her calves and thighs and butt ached; her lungs and throat burned; her skull contracted, squeezing her brain and draping over it an opaque blanket of confusion. She shivered and then tried to stop shivering because it inflamed all the pain. Every square inch of her throbbed as if she’d transformed into a sickening rotten bruise.

If her body had opted to go all in on the experience of the virus, her mind took the opposite tack. She allowed a gray fuzzy wash to settle over her, blurring her thoughts. She knew she didn’t want to think, but still, somehow, she wondered: what had Harry seen in her face to frighten him from across the room?