BY THE TIME she reached the apartment that night, she still hadn’t made a decision about what to do regarding her job. She’d sweated through two sets of scrubs today. She’d had to hide in the bathroom for a good ten minutes at one point to breathe through an overwhelming sense of panic. The panic reinforced itself because she knew if she couldn’t control it, she wouldn’t be able to go back out there, and if she couldn’t go back out there, people were going to suffer as the system ground to a halt. You couldn’t just magic up a fresh ER doc because one of the current ones was freaking out in a toilet stall. Her colleagues, just as swamped as she was, couldn’t pick up her slack.

But what could she do? How would she support her children if she didn’t work? Ellis’s death had left them in an uncomfortable financial situation. Their life insurance policy had collected a fortune in premiums over the years, but after a series of milder pandemics in the past, the insurance companies had carved out an exclusionary act-of-God-type rider for future pandemics. They hadn’t paid a dime when Ellis died, although they’d sent a gushing “heartfelt” letter of condolence. Compton set fire to it, reflecting that in the entire history of the universe, no one had ever been consoled by a bullshit form letter from an insurance company. The only payout associated with this letter would be if she suffered a fury-induced stroke, thereby precipitating a reimbursable cause of death from which her orphaned children would benefit.

Sarcasm aside, Compton’s situation paled in comparison to the plight of thousands of her fellow New Yorkers who hadn’t had the privilege of wealth to begin with. Everywhere you looked: someone who’d lost all income, someone declaring bankruptcy because they couldn’t pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, penniless children who’d lost both parents, or broken parents who’d lost both children. A virus might not discriminate, but people sure did. If you were rich, you fled the city for your second home or bought yourself a top-notch BSL-3 mask from a biocontainment lab or told your white-collar employer you wouldn’t be working until you felt safe. You barricaded yourself and ordered what you needed, and people who had no choice about working brought it to you.

And when it was over, you did what Compton did and looted your mutual funds to replace the income of your lost spouse. Or at least that’s what you did if you were medium rich and you’d lost your husband. You paid some other person to care for your children and clean your home so you could go to your job. And you tried to tell yourself you would keep doing your job, because your investments were dwindling and your children needed a provider and it was weak to think of quitting just because you sweated and hyperventilated every time you went to work.