“There’s someone who insists on speaking to you,” Sally said. “He won’t take no for an answer. He made me tell you he was holding on the line.”

“Oh,” Horton said, trying to muster up a hint of interest. “Who?”

“Dr. Graham Kilburn from Vancouver, Canada. He says he’s an old friend—”

Graham Kilburn. She hadn’t spoken to him in almost ten years, since they graduated from McGill Medical School. “Sally, please transfer the call.”

While Horton waited to be connected, she pictured Kilburn with his tawny blond hair worn short and uncombed long before it became the style. His T-shirt and sweatpants identified him as one of the class jocks. His rugged face with its square jaw, blue-gray eyes, and a crooked smile that generated so many crushes among classmates. She was one of the many. And once, after cramming all night together for a pathology exam, they came within an undergarment each of consummating the relationship. Only the arrival of Kilburn’s roommate stopped them. But they never reached that point again. Theirs evolved into a comfortable friendship. After graduation, when she headed back to the States and he to Vancouver, they exchanged letters for a while, but the correspondence naturally tailed off as their lives grew hectic.

Horton’s phone rang, startling her from the reminiscence. She picked it up. “Graham?”

“Ellen!” Kilburn said enthusiastically. “Ten years, Ellen! Can you believe it?”

“Ten years,” she echoed in disbelief.

“Actually, thirteen since we dissected the King together,” Kilburn said, referring to the obese cadaver in first-year anatomy lab that they had nicknamed ‘the King’ because of his passing resemblance to Elvis Presley in his last years.

“Good old Elvis.” She smiled for the first time in days. “How are you, Graham?”

“Fine. Good. Hanging in there,” he said with strange ambiguity. “And you? What’s happened to you in the last decade?”

She flushed with sudden embarrassment. “Not much. The cloistered research life in Philadelphia. No husband. No kids. Pretty much as dysfunctional as I was in med school.”

“Bull!” Kilburn said. “I heard about your research, El. My hospital is one of the centers involved in a study of your new wonder drug.”

“I had a lot of help,” she said distantly. Her smile faded. “And what have you been up to?”

“Me? I’m the poster child for mediocrity,” Kilburn laughed. “Did my residency in infectious diseases out here at the University of British Columbia, went to New York for a fellowship in microbiology, then back home. I’m a consultant at St. Michael’s Hospital with the predictable midlevel university appointment.” He cleared his throat. “Lived with a great woman for about four years. Screwed that up. Now I’m single and childless.”

“Mediocre, right! You’re still as modest as you were at med school, huh?” Horton said. “And your little sister.” She searched for the name. “Chiara, was it?”

“Kyra,” he said quietly.