His right arm hurts when he flexes it, and he sees then that a catheter burrows into the soft basin of his elbow and attaches to an IV drip on a pole. He wears a mask that makes his breath hot and suffocating and bites into his skin with its bands. His voice is muffled when he shouts out, “Hello? Hello! Help!” He swings his head around in a panic and then finds the anchoring detail he needs: the photo of Mia on the night table.

Over the huff of his breathing, he can hear footsteps approaching. Nora enters the room wearing a mask, goggles, and latex gloves. She pauses six feet away. “How do you feel?”

“I feel—I don’t—how?” He rattles his handcuffs. “Very fucking confused is how I feel.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

His mind is muddied when he tries to bring up any sort of chronology. “I was on campus and . . .” There seem to be things in his head—an apartment, a billowing shower curtain, the police, a knife—that don’t belong to him. “I was sick?”

“You were very sick.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Two days,” she says, but there’s a part of him that wanted her to say five years. That the past five years have all been a fever dream.

“You had an infection. I’ve been treating you with an echinocandin. It’s an—”

“Antifungal.”

“Yes.”

He says, almost to himself, “I was sick,” because more memories are coming back and threading together. “I wasn’t myself. But why didn’t you—”

“Hospitals are death traps of secondary infection. They wouldn’t have known how to treat you and you would have infected others. I believed I knew what to do, and I was right. After you moved out, I had the house sealed up and the ducts cleaned. I installed a top-of-the-line HVAC that is considered the Mercedes-Benz of air purification. No germs, pollutants, fungi, or mildews can survive inside. I am living in a clean lung. For the past forty-eight hours, I’ve cranked up the dehumidifier and kept you hydrated with an IV to keep moisture levels as low as possible. This—along with the echinocandin—appears to be effective.”

His handcuffs rattle again when he tries to reach for the mask. His feels like he’s breathing through an exhaust pipe. “Can you please take this mask off me?”

“I think so,” she says but makes no move to do so. “That was for me more than you. To keep all aerosols contained.” Her eyes roam the room. “I’m going to let this room sit for a few days before I do a deep clean. The pad is hypoallergenic and waterproof, but I still may toss the mattress and box spring. You might have noticed that I had the carpet removed and replaced with a hardwood laminate. So that’s good. For cleaning away any contaminants, I mean.”