“When I worked in the emergency room at the UIC Medical Centre, I had people in my care dying nearly every day. Stabbings, muggings, poor bastards pulled from car wrecks, kids hit by automobiles, fires, suicides. You name it. They’d come in with arms and legs hanging off. People burned from head to toe, so bad they don’t feel a thing. They’ll sit talking to you, and you know what they don’t—in a couple of hours they’re going to die. They talk about patients in trauma. But half the time the doctors are in trauma, too. There’s a limit to how much of that you can take, Li Yan, before you start turning into some kind of automaton.

“The dead? They’re gone. Where, I don’t know. But the body’s just a receptacle, and I can be cold and detached and clinical about cutting it up, because whoever that person was is not there now.”

Her tea was cooling, and she took a longer draught of it and nibbled some sunflower seeds.

“I think maybe doctors must be a little like cops,” Li said. “No home life.”

Margaret flicked him a glance and then looked away again quickly. “No,” she said. “No home life worth a damn.”

He took his life in his hands and strayed into that unknown and potentially treacherous territory he had come close to twice before. “Is that why you and your husband divorced?”

She met his eye head-on. “Oh, we didn’t get divorced,” she said.

He was taken by surprise, confused and disappointed. “But you said you were no longer . . .”

“He’s dead,” she said simply, interrupting.

“Oh.” Li knew he’d just stood on a land-mine. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not.” But her voice was tight with emotion. She reined it in and kept it to herself for some moments, staring at her hands. Then she said, “Michael was a good-looking guy. All the girls thought he was gorgeous, and all my friends thought I was so lucky when we got engaged. So did I. But then, what do you know at twenty-four?” She took a deep, trembling breath. “He was a few years older than me, so I guess I looked up to him. He was so smart, and so passionate about stuff. Especially genetics. And he was always bucking the Establishment, taking the unorthodox view, speaking his mind, even at the expense of his career. That’s why he ended up lecturing at the Roosevelt when he was capable of so much better. I admired him for his principles.” There was a sad fondness in her smile as she remembered.

“In the early days we used to sit up talking late into the night, smoking dope and drinking beer and putting the world to rights. Like teenagers. We were big kids, really.