I heard a sound just outside. Soft footsteps that stopped outside our cubicle.

Anna, I thought. She’s come now. She’s here. She heard Lou. Her child is ill. She can’t be away when her child is ill. It’s Anna.

“Excuse me?” a voice said. “Do you need any help?” It was a man’s voice.

At first I was disappointed. Then I felt relieved, just because somebody had come. Anybody.

I pulled the sheet to one side. It was Francis.

He stared at Lou. His eyes became shiny. “I could hear her all night long,” he said.

“I guess everyone has,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.

“She won’t drink anything.”

“Have you been to the first-aid barracks?”

“Closed.”

“Did you get any sleep?”

“No.”

“Take my bed. I’ll sit with her.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t leave her.”

“You can hear everything anyway.”

His bed was neatly made, as if he hadn’t slept in it. I lay down gingerly on top of the sheet, not wanting to wrinkle it. I lay completely still until I drifted off to sleep.

Her whimpers became a soundtrack for strange dreams. I was in the water again. I was sinking. Above me it grew darker and darker. But I made no effort to get to the surface.

I heard her whimpers from far below and thought I needed to get to her—that sinking was a good thing. That I wanted to sink.

Francis’s voice pulled me up slowly. He was singing to her. It was broad daylight. The hall had come to life around us, but I couldn’t hear Lou. I hurried in to them, stopped in the doorway. She was sleeping peacefully.

“Go ahead and get some more rest,” Francis said.

“That’s okay,” I said and sat down beside him.

He looked at me. “You need to sleep.”

“No, I don’t.”

I turned toward Lou. She was lying on her back, with her arms over her head and her hair spread across the pillow. She was breathing calmly.

“Nice kid,” Francis said.

“Yes. She is.”

“You’re lucky.”

“Yes.”

I remembered the bandage he had taken out of the trash can in the first-aid barracks. Was it a kind of keepsake? The only thing he had left?

“Do you have a daughter?” I asked. “A grown daughter?”

He looked away. “I have a daughter. . . . No. I had a daughter.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, I mean . . . my condolences.”

The words felt heavy in my mouth. I couldn’t remember ever having spoken the phrase before. Old-fashioned, it belonged in a museum. But it was what people said.

“Contaminated water,” he said. “Poisoning. It all happened so quickly.”

Poisoning. So quickly. So quickly. A dead daughter. Two dead daughters.

“I think this is the same thing,” I forced myself to say.

He turned to face me again. “What did you say?”