Chapter

Sixteen

Alana can see that Nico hasn’t slept. It’s more than just his bloodshot eyes or the dark pouches beneath them. The shadow on his cheeks and, more strikingly, the unruly spikes of hair tell the story. The messiness is so unlike him. She wonders if he remembers texting her at 1:37 a.m. and then again at 2:04 a.m. The two rambling messages—both filled with misspelled words and Italian phrases—expressed his drunken fear that it might already be too late to contain the outbreak. But it was the last two lines in his second text that stuck in her mind and kept her up an extra hour or two. “I cannot resent this plague too much,” he wrote. “After all, it brought you back into my life.”

Alana gets angry again thinking about it. Nico is the one with the family. The adorable kids. The loving spouse. They both had made their choices. And, while she had never felt the urge when she was younger, now, in her late thirties, she wonders more and more what life might have been like had she settled down and had kids of her own. It’s unfair of Nico to drunkenly toss around verbal grenades such as “back into my life.” He has things she might never have.

She knows it’s not the time or the place to confront him over the texts. The little café behind the hospital is teeming this morning. People chat in English around them. She assumes some, if not most, are with the international media, who seemed to have jumped en masse on the outbreak overnight.

They have to lean across the table and speak in low voices to avoid being overheard. “So this Emilio . . . he has not answered your calls?” Nico asks.

“Or my texts,” Alana says.

The creases in his brow deepen. “It probably has nothing to do with the plague.”

“Maybe,” she says, but her gut tells her otherwise. “How is Claudio today?”

“No worse. Perhaps a little better. The plague certainly has not claimed his sense of humor . . . unfortunately.” He squeezes his forehead between his thumb and forefinger. “Alana, did you hear about the latest death?”

“Yes.” Byron woke her at five-thirty with a text detailing the fourth known victim. The young woman had apparently been one of Sonia Poletti’s closest friends. “The infection is grabbing a foothold in the community.”

“At least three more new cases overnight,” he says. “One of them is admitted across town to a different hospital, Ospedale Centralino. And, Alana . . .” He pauses. “This patient only has buboes in his armpits and groin. It’s not in his lungs.”

“How does that happen, Nico?”

“Mannaggia, Alana!” he groans. “How does any of this happen?”

“You know what I mean! The only way to transmit the plague from person to person is through the lungs, not the skin.”

“It’s true.”

“Maybe he picked it up from the same place Vittoria did?”

“The construction site?”