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her, Joan quietly diagnosed.
    Gregor and Pete, the other partners in New Tech, sat in chairs equidistant from her, the three of them facing different directions. No one spoke. They were worried about Davis (although, secretly, Joan suspected that she cared for his health more than they did, even if they’d known him longer), but there was another element to their concern: it could be any one of them bleeding out in the operating room just now.
    The clinic building was on the television, monitored by a rerouted traffic helicopter. From the air it looked institutional and generic, which is what Gregor and Pete and Davis had in mind when they moved in, Joan guessed. The building was nonthreatening, its cube shape unobjectionable to anyone but an architecture critic. Deliberate police paced the lawn in front. She could see yellow evidence flags stuck in the ground at varying radii to the spot where Davis fell. Curious bystanders assembled at a safe distance. A banner of text across the bottom titled the events “Clone Clinic Terror.”
    Frantic nurses had led Davis’s sobbing wife and daughter to another room inside. Joan was thankful for that, mostly because she wouldn’t know what to say to them. She had always been uncomfortable around Jackie Moore. Even under these circumstances, every glance between them would be loaded with subtext in Joan’s mind.
    Davis had confided their occasional troubles to her in intimate detail. Ever attracted to older men (Joan’s graduate school relationships consisted of a series of affairs with professors and residents), she reciprocated in an empty, flirtatious way, knowing the aspects of his character that made Davis most desirable — loyalty, confidence, empathy — were the very traits that would keep him tethered to home, even (or rather, especially) if home was making him miserable.
    Joan had had three sexual relationships with married men in the past, and she eventually regretted them all. Two of those men were now divorced, and that assuaged and compounded her guilt in equal amounts. The third was still married, and when she was reminded of their affair — by a photograph, or a printed reference to the Garfield Park Conservatory (which he had admired), or by the exit to his home on the Edens Expressway — an icy shiver consumed her. Never again, she thought.
    The status quo in her relations with Davis suited her fine. He liked her and she liked him, and except for a touch on the arm that lasted two seconds too long when he was helping her with her coat at last year’s Christmas party, it remained unphysical. She could enjoy the vicarious attentions of a smart and handsome and fit older man, and she could sneak looks at him in the office and imagine, in the car on the way home or alone in bed at night, what might have been possible between them had they met at another time, in some other place.
    When Gregor appeared through the swinging doors to the trauma center, Joan realized she hadn’t noticed he’d been gone.
    “It looks good,” Gregor said. “He’s going to be fine.”
    “Thank God. Lord. Christ,” Pete said. “Are you sure? Can we see him? Can I call that reporter?”
    “What reporter?” Joan frowned.
    “Channel seven. I’d have to look up her name. She promised me she’d keep the cameras away from the hospital if I called her as soon as we knew something.”
    Gregor nodded. “Yeah. Call her. In a minute.” He looked at the TV. “Any news? Have they caught the guy?”
    Pete said they hadn’t.
    “Bonavita!” Gregor growled. “Fucking Bonavita for sure. He’s going cross-country. Memphis, Chicago, probably Saint Louis next.”
    “I have to call my wife,” Pete said. “She’s at her cousin’s house in Barrington.” He slid a hand flush to his forehead, under his short bangs. “Can we go home, do you think?”
    Joan said, “We can’t hide.”
    Her partners gave no indication they agreed.
    An hour or so later, after Pete and Gregor had made their