She heard her fellow nurses and nuns bustling around her, readying themselves for the day of mending limbs and saving souls, but she would stay where she was. They gave her encouraging looks as they left her. She wished she had as much hope for her life as they did. Sister Petra put a hand to her head and left her a glass of water. They’d tried the regular treatments. There wasn’t much you could do at this stage for the kind of malaria she had.

Constance had been in Leopoldville for almost two years. She’d received her nursing certificate six months after the war had ended and left for Africa soon after, part of a delegation that included Nurse Jones and two of the doctors from Hastonbury. Some good souls had an insatiable appetite for healing and fixing, and she liked to count herself as one of them, but she suspected her motives were a bit more complicated. Here, at least until she’d gotten sick, she’d been occupied every moment of the day. There was the noise and bustle of neediness all around her in the hospital, and at night in her dormitory, a good soul sleeping on either side. She’d needed to get away from the multitude of ghosts at Hastonbury: her mother, her brother, her grieving, deluded father. And of course, Daniel. She didn’t think she could stand to stay home and lose any more.

Daniel would be ahead of her by three years, give or take. That wasn’t much. It wasn’t so bad to think of dying, knowing she wouldn’t be far behind him.

She knew she shouldn’t think like that. She was just twenty-three. It wasn’t the full, happy life Daniel had encouraged. But loneliness had gotten its grip on her, and it wouldn’t let go.

In her fever-dreams she often thought forward to the person she would be next. It didn’t feel morbid to her but sort of exciting. Where would she turn up, and what would she be like? Would Daniel really be able to find her, as he’d promised? Would he be able to love her? What if she had warts on her nose and gas and bad breath and spat when she talked?

She thought of the note she had written and left in her old bedroom. How would she get herself to find it? How would she get herself to even remember to look? There had to be a way, and she would figure it out. She would not stay quiet inside her new self, whomever she was. She intended to give herself a very hard time.

She often thought of the very beginning. She tried again and again to pinpoint the mysterious thing that had happened in those seventeen days she’d spent with him. When he’d first woken up and called her by the wrong name, she’d pitied him and patronized him, as she’d done with many of the boys. Not out of meanness. But because there were so many of them and their needs were so vast and there was only one of her. She’d thought D. Weston was an exceptionally handsome and particularly addled version of the same, and that was all. He was too sick to be denied her indulgence. She’d listen to any madness that came out of his mouth and nod thoughtfully at the right times. She wished she’d listened more closely, less skeptically, so that she could remember it better now.

Because something happened. The addled things were true things. Too many of them to discount. And the way he said them, the odd way he saw her and knew her, cut to the very center of her. He didn’t tell his stories like someone who read about them. His vision of the world was momentous, and it included her. Nothing in her small life could compare after that. In seventeen days her pity had turned into profound regard and overwhelming devotion. He was holding on to her, all of her places and parts, in a way she couldn’t do for herself.

“Why do you always call me Sophia?” she asked him once, knowing how tenaciously he hung on to it.

“Because if I don’t, I really could lose you,” he told her.

She’d done her best here, but some big part of the real, living, forward-leaning part of her died when Daniel did. She’d sensed it at the time, and she knew it now. Maybe the malaria sensed it, too.

She hoped that God, or whoever it was who ruled these matters, wouldn’t punish her too grievously for it. Please forgive me for not trying harder. It’s not that I don’t love life; I do. It’s just that this one is too lonely.