Three days. Three days in; could that be right? I found I could not remember the day on which my children had arrived at the hospital. It had been a rainy day, or maybe it had been blustery and sunny, or maybe it had been a frosty night. I couldn’t remember. Had we arrived in the daytime or in the nighttime? A vague memory surfaced of crystalline stars glittering against a black sky, but that couldn’t be right, because you couldn’t really see the stars in the middle of metro Atlanta; not like that. This must be some other memory, perhaps from my time with Daniel in Africa. From the stars of the African sky, you gleaned some sense of the depth and vastness of infinity. From the Atlantan sky, you often gleaned only smog.

“Kira,” someone said. Wearily, I raised my head and then sprang to the side. To my astonishment I realized I must have dozed off while standing. How could I have fallen asleep? Around me bustled a pod of puffy-suited people: a respiratory therapist, two nurses. And Dr. Zhou.

“My dear,” he said. He motioned toward the wall with the window, where I spied perhaps a cubic foot of unoccupied space. We wedged ourselves against opposing walls at the corner, this being the most privacy the room afforded.

“I’ll give Rorie another half an hour,” said Dr. Zhou. “Okay? We will buy her a few minutes with these adjustments”—he motioned toward the respiratory therapist, who was messing with Rorie’s BiPAP machine—“so you can talk with her, and then we must intubate her. It’s remarkable she’s held out this long, but the strain is becoming too much, I fear.”

Rorie’s lungs had held steady but her other organs were failing, first her kidneys and now her heart, overtaxing her system with fluid despite all the interventions. As a mother, I could not allow myself to process what Rorie’s labs indicated. As a physician, I knew.

I could not think of anything to say.

“And Beau,” said Dr. Zhou. For once his face lost its perpetual smile. “In a few minutes we will all step aside so you might have some time with him as well.”

“Thank you,” I said, and then my mind made some kind of fatal adjustment and I understood. “Now?” I asked. “You think it’s going to be now?”

“I think very soon,” said Dr. Zhou in a voice so laden with tenderness I would have wept if I hadn’t been weeping already. “You will be right here with him, yes? That is what he will know; his mother was with him the entire time. You will be holding his hand and kissing his cheek and he will know.”