Read Chapter 2: — THE DOOR BETWEEN THEM

Seventeen years earlier, Lena had met Adrian without seeing his face.

In the spring of 2003, a cluster of SARS exposures forced part of a Toronto medical-university housing complex into quarantine. Lena was sixteen and visiting her father, Professor Martin Ward, when the restrictions began. Martin disappeared almost immediately into an isolation unit, leaving his daughter alone in an apartment that smelled faintly of disinfectant and old textbooks.

Every evening she heard ambulance sirens.

Every evening the television displayed new numbers.

Her mother, Helen, was four hours away and furious with Martin for allowing their daughter to be caught in the middle of an outbreak. Martin called when he could, often after midnight, speaking as if reassurance could be delivered in three clinical sentences.

Then one night Lena broke.

She sat on the floor beside the front door and cried until someone knocked from the hallway.

“Don’t open it,” a young man said. “I’m your neighbour.”

She stopped crying from sheer embarrassment.

“My name is Adrian Shaw. First-year medicine. Your dad told me you were staying here.”

“You’re not supposed to be in the corridor.”

“Neither are you, technically. Your toes are under the door.”

She pulled them back.

He made her laugh.

Adrian’s mother was an emergency physician serving with the Canadian Armed Forces and had also been deployed during the crisis. His father had died when Adrian was a child. He understood the peculiar terror of loving people whose work required them to walk toward danger.

So every evening they sat on opposite sides of the same door.

They spoke about school, basketball, medicine, mountains, terrible cafeteria food, and whether anyone could survive six years of medical training without becoming strange. Lena learned that Adrian wanted to become a pulmonologist. Adrian learned that Lena had no idea what she wanted, only what she did not want: she did not want to become her father.

When restrictions lifted, they finally met face to face.

He was taller than she imagined, awkward in a way his voice had never been. He touched the top of her head as if confirming she was real.

“It’s over,” he told her.

She believed him.

Years later, she enrolled in medicine anyway.

By then Adrian was two classes ahead. Martin, delighted that his daughter had entered the profession, casually asked his brilliant former neighbour to “keep an eye on her.” Neither man understood that the arrangement was gasoline beside a flame.

Their relationship lasted five years.

It ended over a family secret neither of them had been responsible for and neither knew how to survive.

Now, standing outside a Lakeshore conference centre in the winter of another possible outbreak, Lena wondered whether people ever truly leave old crises behind.

“You’re staring,” Adrian said.

She blinked. “Sorry.”

“No, you weren’t.”

He smiled, and for one dangerous second he was twenty-two again.

Lena retreated into work.

“Our hospital has had four similar cases,” she said. “Two linked to Bayview Market. One family cluster came through clinic yesterday.”

Adrian’s expression changed immediately.

“A whole household?”

“Parents and a child. Same fever, cough, fatigue. The adults have bilateral infiltrates.”

“Any influenza?”

“Negative. RSV, adenovirus, mycoplasma — all negative so far.”

“Human-to-human transmission.”

“Maybe.”

“Lena.”

“I said maybe.”

The physician in him accepted the distinction. The man who knew her did not.

“You think it is.”

She looked toward the lake.

“Yes.”

He was silent for a moment.

“My father’s team thinks so too,” she said. “Or at least they’re worried.”

Adrian nodded slowly.

“Then your hospital should isolate early.”

“We already started.”

“Of course you did.”

He sounded almost proud.

Lena hated that she liked hearing it.