She called 911 and waited in front of the house for the ambulance. Minutes passed like hours. She thought about calling her mother but her mother was at a trade show in Sri Lanka and Sandra didn’t know how to reach her. It was a sunny afternoon in May, beginning to feel like summer in the Boston suburb where Sandra lived. There was no one else on the street. It was as if the houses had gone to sleep. As if all the neighbors had been sealed indoors, like dreams the houses were dreaming.

The medics who arrived took Sandra to the hospital with them and found a place for her to sleep. Sandra’s mother arrived back from Colombo the following morning. Sandra’s father, it turned out, had been dead long before Sandra discovered him. There was nothing she could have done. Kyle’s young body had put up a fiercer resistance to the poison he was breathing, a doctor explained. He was alive, but his brain was irreversibly damaged and he would never recover his higher functions.

*   *   *

Sandra’s mother had died seven years after her father, of a pancreatic cancer that had been diagnosed too late for meaningful treatment. Her will had stipulated a sum of money to be held in trust for Sandra’s education and a far more substantial amount to pay for Kyle’s continuing needs. When Sandra moved to Houston she had asked the estate’s lawyers to find Kyle a residence nearby, if there was an acceptable one, where she could visit him regularly. The Live Oaks Polycare Residential Complex was what they had chosen. Live Oaks was devoted to caring for severely disabled patients and was rated as one of the best such facilities in the country. It was expensive, but no matter; the estate could afford it.

Kyle had been sedated for the flight west. Sandra had arranged to be present when he woke up. But if waking up in a strange bed in a strange room had caused him any distress or anxiety, Kyle had shown no sign of it.

*   *   *

He sat in the midday warmth as if waiting for her to speak. Today, unusually, Sandra wasn’t sure where to begin.

She started by telling him about Jefferson Bose. Who he was and how much she liked him. “I think you’d like him, too. He’s a policeman.” She paused. “But he’s something else, too.”

She lowered her voice, though there was no one else in the mott to hear her.

“You always liked stories about Mars from the Spin days. How the human colonies turned into whole civilizations while Earth was wrapped up in the Spin barrier. How they had a fourth stage of life, where people could live longer if they took on certain obligations and duties. Remember that? The stories Wun Ngo Wen told the world, before he was killed?