“Shit! Sorry!” she yelps, letting go of my hand. Everyone moves and the bubble bursts; Compton is laughing, straightening her hair; Hannah dabs at her eyes and flutters her hands. I stand, shifting my torso from side to side, stretching as if I am about to run onto a football field instead of what I am actually about to do, which is enter a gigantic holiday party in Buckhead and deliver a speech about our national experience during the pandemic, hoping to inspire a few of the bazillionaires present to kick in a hefty donation to the research I champion. I still do not have a clue what I will say.

Employing the telepathy for which she’s famous, Vani comments on this. “We know you can’t talk about the kids. But are you going to personalize the talk at all? Or keep it factual?”

“I know from personal experience not to try to convince anyone with facts,” I say.

My friends laugh, but it’s true. It is a peculiarity of human nature that we care more about smaller things than we do bigger ones, and we care more about anecdotes than we do evidence. If you stop a random guy on the street and tell him millions of people died horribly from an unknown virus, he’ll express polite horror. Still, though, his concern will almost certainly be filtered through a veil of protective denial; vast numbers of people dying—especially elsewhere—is too abstract a concept. But if you show him a photo of a grieving mother, forced to doom one of her children so another might have the chance to live, that’s different. This time the horror will be unfeigned. Our inability to process a widespread catastrophe explains why we express genuine dismay when a developer hacks down a magnificent eighty-year-old oak tree, but we cannot muster up similar outrage in response to the devastation of the rain forest in Brazil or the effect of trillions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions on our environment. It’s too overwhelming.

“I could share a few stories from the ER with you,” Compton offers. “God knows I’ve seen plenty of them.”

I consider this. Compton has never told us much about those harrowing days in the emergency department during the first wave, a time that coincided with the loss of her husband. For the longest time afterward, she dimmed, contracting into a shell version of herself, answering our questions with rote precision while managing to avoid saying anything that meant anything. She still does this from time to time; I’m not saying she’s recovered. But since her move from the city, some of her natural snarkiness has returned. I’ve never been so relieved to hear a bunch of piercing, inappropriate complaints.