Read Chapter 8: — PREPARING FOR THE WORST

Lockdown made the city sound different.

Without buses, trains and traffic, every ambulance seemed louder. Church bells carried farther. Footsteps in the courtyard below their flat could be heard through closed windows.

Maya watched the announcement three times.

Stay at home. Essential journeys only. Schools closed. Hospitality venues closed. Mainline stations restricted. No non-essential travel in or out of Ravensbridge.

Their Christmas was gone.

So was everybody else's.

Ethan spent the morning driving staff to St Anne's. On the way, he collected three final-year medical students who had returned to the city to volunteer. One of them, Jamie Foster, was twenty-two and talked when nervous.

"My mum thinks I've lost my mind," Jamie said. "My dad thinks it's brilliant. They're currently not speaking."

"Families are adaptable. They'll find a new subject to argue about."

At the closed station, hundreds of people stood outside with luggage, discovering too late that trains had been suspended. Police tried to keep order. A woman screamed that her father was dying in Scotland. A student sat on a suitcase and cried.

Ethan wanted to help all of them.

He could not.

That was the first lesson of the lockdown: need was larger than any one person's capacity.

At home, Maya had a lesson of her own.

Their downstairs neighbour, Linda Shaw, knocked at the door wearing two scarves across her face. Her husband and eight-year-old son had travelled to attend a family wedding outside the city. Both had developed fevers. The regional hospital had admitted them.

Linda could not leave Ravensbridge.

"I can't get through to anyone," she said. "I don't even know what ward they're on."

Maya spent two hours calling numbers and messaging Claire. Eventually they found a doctor who knew someone at the hospital.

It was not much. Just a promise to check.

Linda cried with relief.

After she left, Maya stood in the hallway for a long time.

For the first time since Ethan had chosen to stay, she understood the feeling that had pulled him back from the motorway.