Every day, I wake and experience it again: an overwhelming rush of gratitude for his life. He should have died, but he lived, the combination of Declan’s drug and Dr. Zhou’s last-ditch heroics coming through in the end. Children are remarkably resilient, emerging intact from medical scenarios an adult would never survive, but still, it stunned the team taking care of him when he made it through that worst night.

After it became clear Beau would live, I confessed to Mike Zhou what I’d done and informed him I would be reporting myself to the CDC. Like Wally, he must have felt enough pity not to chastise me, but the next day he did order a blood test to quantify the viral load in Beau’s bloodstream. When the results came back—nearly undetectable—it was the first and only time I ever saw him cry.

We pieced it together later, the synergistic effect of the experimental drug with the therapies Dr. Zhou employed, and while it didn’t turn out to be a game changer for every ill patient, Beau’s experience led to several other patients receiving the drug under compassionate-use criteria even as the formal trials progressed. It pains me to say this—I never wanted this—but Declan insisted on naming the medication Kiravimab. In a beautiful twist of irony, the single-domain antibody in Kiravimab is obtained by immunization of camelids with the desired antigen, which then employs a vector—part of a virus, basically—to deliver the isolated mRNA to human cells. If that sounds confusing, then picture this: camels and a virus brought us down, and camels and a virus helped save us. Few people realize it, but the history of science is crammed with poetic justice.

Ultimately, the human trials demonstrated a forty percent reduction in mortality. It helped save Beau, and many others, until the vaccines were ready.

Or maybe, as Hannah believes, it was not merely the science and the medicine that saved Beau but the hand of God, reaching down to grant my son—and my daughter—a reprieve. They stayed in the hospital for weeks, recovering, but recover they did. In any case, I was spared the agony of so many other mothers throughout the world in this pandemic. I thought he would die, and he lived.