She was there twenty minutes later, breathing hard. She had simply run from her condo, which was less than a mile away in the adjoining hilltop neighborhood. She worked part-time now, mostly from home, which was within walking distance of Sophia’s preschool. The Forthrast family had adopted her, at the age of seven, from an orphanage in Eritrea, and raised her in a farm town in Iowa. Her adoptive mother had died in an accident and she had become a ward of the whole extended family. Corvallis wasn’t certain who her parents were according to the letter of the law, but she’d become very close to her uncle Richard. Corvallis saw her running down the sidewalk, puffs of steam coming from her mouth. To have come here on foot was an unusual choice, but just the sort of calculation that Zula would make; the distance was such that she could cover it this way faster than it would take to summon an Uber. She slowed to a fast walk as she approached the building. The glass doors opened for her automatically. She was wearing a sweater and jeans and toting the knapsack she often used in lieu of a purse; she hadn’t bothered with a hat or a raincoat. Her uncontained hair had drawn humidity from the air and was a bedewed, corkscrewy glory. As she came in she recognized Corvallis, who had stood up. She took a step in his direction before correcting her course to the nurses’ station. “Zula Forthrast,” she announced, reaching for her wallet. “Here to see my uncle Richard Forthrast.” She slid her driver’s license across the counter. “I was told he was here.” And only then did she look up and meet Corvallis’s eye. She looked alert and interested. After some of the things she had lived through, nothing much could make her distraught. Not that she didn’t have feelings, but she’d learned how to wall them off. The events of a few years ago had thrust her into the public spotlight for a while, forced her to develop the knack that all famous people had of maintaining a certain persona while exposed to the gaze of strangers. It was serving her well now. She had a kind of distracted air about her, and Corvallis couldn’t tell whether she was dazed by the news or being wry. How many things could go wrong in her life?

“Nothing is simple with my uncle, huh?” she said.

“Nope” was the best Corvallis could come up with.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

He didn’t know what to say.

“It’s pretty bad, huh?” she said. Giving him permission.

“I kinda got the sense that it was super bad,” he admitted.

She nodded and blinked.

The nurse informed them that Richard had already been transferred to the ICU and gave them an idea of how to find it.