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late-summer weekend, she had taken the bus to St. Louis to be interviewed. Her name was put on a waiting list for Korea. But time passed; the mission was postponed, then canceled altogether. Caroline was put on another list, this time for Burma.
    And then, while she was still checking the mail and dreaming of the tropics, Dr. Henry had arrived.
    An ordinary day, nothing to indicate otherwise. It was late autumn by then, a season of colds, and the room was crowded, full of sneezes, muffled coughs. Caroline herself could feel a dull scratching deep in her throat as she called the next patient, an elderly gentleman whose cold would worsen in the next weeks, turning into the pneumonia that would finally kill him. Rupert Dean. He was sitting in the leather armchair, fighting a nosebleed, and he stood up slowly, stuffing his cloth handkerchief, with its vivid spots of blood, into his pocket. When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean’s wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. “She was the love of my life,” he announced to Caroline, his voice so loud that people looked up.
    The outer door of the office opened, rattling the glass-paneled inner door.
    “She’s lovely,” Caroline said. Her hands were trembling. Because she was moved by his love and his sorrow, and because no one had ever loved her with this same passion. Because she was almost thirty years old, and yet if she died the next day there would be no one to mourn her like Rupert Dean still mourned his wife after more than twenty years. Surely she, Caroline Lorraine Gill, must be as unique and deserving of love as the woman in the old man’s photo, and yet she had not found any way to reveal this, not through art or love or even through the fine high calling of her work.
    She was still trying to compose herself when the door from the vestibule to the waiting room swung open. A man in a brown tweed overcoat hesitated in the doorway for a moment, his hat in his hand, taking in the yellow textured wallpaper, the fern in the corner, the metal rack of worn magazines. He had brown hair with a reddish tinge and his face was lean, his expression attentive, assessing. He was not distinguished, yet there was something in his stance, his manner—some quiet alertness, some quality of listening—that set him apart. Caroline’s heart quickened and she felt a tingling on her skin, both pleasurable and irritating, like the unexpected brush of a moth’s wing. His eyes caught hers—and she knew. Before he crossed the room to shake her hand, before he opened his mouth to speak his name, David Henry, in a neutral accent that placed him as an outsider. Before all this, Caroline was sure of a single simple fact: the person she’d been waiting for had come.
    He had not been married then. Not married, not engaged, and with no attachments that she could ascertain. Caroline had listened carefully, both that day as he toured the clinic and later at the welcome parties and meetings. She heard what others, absorbed by the flow of polite conversation, distracted by his unfamiliar accent and sudden unexpected bursts of laughter, did not: that aside from mentioning his time in Pittsburgh now and then, a fact already known from his résumé and diploma, he never made reference to the past. For Caroline, this reticence gave him an air of mystery, and the mystery increased her sense that she knew him in ways the others did not. For her, their every encounter was charged, as if she were saying to him across the desk, the examination table, the beautiful, imperfect bodies of one patient or another, I know you; I understand; I see what the others have missed. When she overheard people joking about her crush on the new doctor, she flushed with surprise and embarrassment. But she was