I heard Grace scream somewhere behind me, and it snapped me back to reality. Through tears I saw her running down the aisle, and suddenly pain surged through my hand. I stared at it, bloody and crumpled, incredulous. All at once, I was afraid of myself.

Grace’s arms were around me, her face against my chest, her whole body shaking. I held her with one hand, my other hanging limply at my side. Pain throbbed through my entire arm, and I was glad. It was the only thing I wanted to feel. Not love, not hope, not peace. Pain was all I deserved. I silently cursed God and felt my heart go cold.

GRACE

SOMETHING BROKE THAT DAY besides Jacks hand. We couldn’t talk anymore; we couldn’t connect. Jack retreated into his head somewhere, and I could do nothing to pull him out. He stopped sleeping at night and would sit outside on the deck doing nothing. Sometimes I joined him, but he wouldn’t acknowledge me, and I could sense he didn’t want me there, so I’d go back to bed and cry myself to sleep. He would wander around the house or sit in the den in front of the computer without using it, and after a couple of days of this he would crash on the bed and sleep around the clock. Then it would start over again.

So far Bree and I tested negative for the virus. Our medicine cabinet became a small pharmacy, and our grocery list looked like something out of a hippie-vegan cookbook: sprouts, soy milk, vegetables I’d never heard of and didn’t know how to prepare. Articles from the Internet were strewn about the house, underlined and highlighted during manic episodes where Jack would suddenly burst into action and channel all this strange behavior into an attempt to figure out some way of beating the insidious illness inside him. These rare bouts of energy were the only times I was able to get him to engage. I took shameless advantage of them, asking him questions I already knew the answers to and suggesting treatments we’d previously discarded just to hear him talk. But eventually the energy would run out, and he’d end up yet again on the deck at 3:00 a.m.

The worst part was that he wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Zoe and Todd. They were so wrapped up in their new family that they didn’t seem to notice that we’d stopped calling or inviting them over, and though normally I would have been offended, instead I was relieved.

I tried to keep the atmosphere happy for Bree. She was getting mobile now, and she kept me busy chasing her all over the house. I read to her, took her to the park, played with her in the pool, always inviting Jack to join us—begging him—but he would simply shake his head and murmur, “Not now.”