For a moment my efforts to smooth out my worries seemed successful; I dissociated, a shadow-person standing in a shadow-room, the whiskey burning its way down my throat the only proof of life. I drank and I floated and I didn’t think.

The buzzing of my phone brought me back. I didn’t intend to answer; whatever it was could wait until tomorrow. Unless, of course, it couldn’t wait until tomorrow. That was the problem with being a subject matter expert at the CDC during a plague involving your personal virus. Almost nothing could wait.

This call didn’t involve work, though: Georgia’s picture lit up the screen. I might have let it go to voicemail but for two things: first, Georgia never called anyone; and second, she’d just had a baby. Curiosity flooded me as to how my freewheeling friend was handling motherhood. Perhaps she wanted parenting advice.

I answered a split second too late. I’d just lifted a thumb to jab at redial when the phone rang again. I answered it reflexively, assuming it was Georgia calling back. “Hey, how’s it going? Are your breasts about to fall off?”

A brief silence, then from a voice that wasn’t Georgia’s: “No worse than usual, and not any more than usual, I guess. They looked a lot better before I had kids.”

I held the phone out and peered at it. It was not Georgia; it was Zadie.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I was expecting Georgia—she just called.”

“Oh,” said Zadie. “So you already know.” Her voice, usually so lilting and animated, held a curious flatness.

“Know what?”

“I thought you just spoke with Georgia.”

“No; I missed her. I thought you were her, calling back. What’s wrong?”

“Hannah’s sick,” said Zadie. A choked keening filled the phone; she’d given up the effort to hold off tears. “It’s bad, they think.”

“Oh no,” I breathed. I backpedaled through the room until I bumped the arm of a chair and fell into it. “What— Tell me what you know.”

“Georgia texted her a few times to ask something and she didn’t answer, even after a day. That’s nothing like Hannah; she’d never ignore a message from one of her regular patients for that long, let alone from Georgia. She didn’t know Harry’s number, so she sent Jonah over to leave a note on their door and Harry texted her. She’d been sick but was doing okay at home at first.”

“Is she—is she in the tent hospital?”

“No, she’s in the regular hospital because of the late-term pregnancy. They can’t deliver a baby in the tent.”

“She’s what—twenty-seven weeks? She’s not in labor, is she? Is she on a ventilator?”

“I don’t know.” Zadie’s voice broke again. “I don’t know. Georgia said she’d text us all as soon as she speaks to Harry.”