"The… ca…" she'd said. She'd tried to say more but it had been as much as she could do. Her strength gone, she just lay back and fell asleep. And she had slept right up until those last moments of her life when she'd opened her eyes and stared into his and told him she loved him.

Thinking about it now he realized the little she had told him had come in two sections, one quite separate from the other. The first had come in snippets: that she was originally to have been on the ill-fated plane with her husband and son but a last-minute change of plans brought her back to Washington a day earlier; what had happened at her home after the funerals; and finally what she had told him when she'd called him in England, saying she was dying from a staph infection caused by a strain of untreatable bacteria that she was certain had been given to her deliberately. "The… ca"-what she'd started to say when he'd asked her to explain it, and who the "they" were she was referring to, he had no idea.

The second section had come from utterances she'd made in her sleep. Most had been everyday things, calling out the names of her husband, "Mike," or her son "Charlie," or her sister "Katy," or saying things like "Charlie, please turn down the TV" or "The class is Tuesday." But she'd said other things too. These had seemingly been aimed at her husband and were filled with alarm or fear or both. "Mike, what is it?" Or "You're frightened. I can see it!" Or "Why won't you tell me what it is?" Or "It's the others, isn't it?" And then later, a sudden fearful blurting-"I don't like the white-haired man."

That part he was familiar with because it was a piece of the story she had told him when she'd called him in Manchester and asked him to come.

"The fever came less than a day after I woke up in the clinic," she'd said.