Even if West hadn’t wanted to play tennis, there was no need for her to have been rude about it unless she hated him. Forget it. Her voice saying those heartless words followed him as he ran harder, lungs beginning to burn, catching fire around the edges as his legs reached farther and sweat left a trail of scattered spots. He tried to outrun the voice and the person who owned it, anger flinging him through the night and past the fifty yard line. Legs wobbled as he slowed. Brazil fell into cool, damp grass. He lay on his back, panting, heart thundering, and he had a premonition that he was going to die.

Virginia West felt like it. She lay in bed, lights out, a hot water bottle held close as contractions prepared her for birth for no good cause. Ever since she was fourteen, she’d gone into labor once a month, some episodes worse than others. On occasion, the pain was debilitating enough to send her home from school, a date, or work, lying about what was wrong as she gulped Midol. After a sullen Raines, the paramedic, had dropped her off, she’d taken four Motrin, a little too late. Hadn’t Dr. Bourgeois told her to take two hundred milligrams of ibuprofen four times a day three days before trouble started so it could be prevented, and don’t cut yourself or get a nosebleed, Virginia? West, as usual, had gotten too busy to bother with anything so mundane, so trivial, as her health. Niles recognized the cyclical emergency and responded, curling around his owner’s neck and head, keeping her warm. He was pleased she wasn’t going anywhere and he didn’t have to share their bed.

Chief Judy Hammer was having morbid premonitions and was bedside, too, in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) of Carolinas Medical Center, where Seth’s condition was serious and on the wrong side of getting better. Hammer was in shock, dressed in gown, mask, and gloves, sitting by his bed. High dose penicillin, clindamycin, and immunic globulin dripped into her husband’s veins in an effort to counter necrotizing fasciitis (NF). It was a rare infection associated with systemic infection and a fulminant course, according to Hammer’s personal observations and the notes she had been taking every time the infectious disease doctor spoke.

This was all somehow related to everyday group A betahemolytic streptococci and Staphylococcus aureus, which Hammer could not comprehend beyond figuring out that the microscopic bastards were eating her husband alive. Meanwhile, Seth’s oxygen content in his bloodstream had dropped below normal, and the medical center was in a panic. Personnel had made Seth, the V.I.P., a top priority, and specialists were in and out. Hammer could not keep them straight. She could not think as she stared at her husband’s slack, feverish face and smelled his death through the mask she wore.

During the Civil War, surgeons would have diagnosed her husband’s condition as simple gangrene. No fancy Latin term changed the reality of flesh turning black and green at a wound site, with limbs and eventually the person rotting alive. The only treatment for NF was antibiotics, surgery, and amputation. About a third of the three to five hundred people who got the disease in the U.S. annually died, or approximately thirty percent, according to what Hammer had found through searches on America Online.