What Happened to Priya Ranganathan

Priya Ranganathan had been Voss's closest collaborator for eleven years, a neurologist with a clinic up on Capitol Hill and a habit of saying exactly one sentence too many in every meeting, which was why Nora had always liked her.

She had stopped coming to work in August.

Her house had the blinds down at noon. The bell did nothing, and Nora was turning away when the door opened four inches and Priya's face appeared in the gap — thinner, older, and not frightened at all, which was worse: she had finished being afraid of him weeks ago.

"You're the lawyer," she said. "You've come about Adrian."

"I've come about Warren Dace."

"I don't know anything about Warren Dace." She opened the door another six inches. "Come in. Don't touch anything. I've been ill."

The living room had a coat over the mirror. That was the first thing Nora noticed, and she noticed it the way you notice a chair set against a door. Priya sat with her back to the window and talked for forty minutes about nothing at all — the clinic, the permits, a dog she was thinking about adopting — and then, in the middle of a sentence about the dog, she stopped, and said:

"He told me it was a correction. He told me the body makes a mistake in the second decade and never stops making it. He said it with his hands out like a priest." She looked at the covered mirror. "I stood in that room, Nora. I watched him take the injection. Eleven seconds, and then I watched him stop being Adrian, not slowly, not in a horror-movie way — quickly, completely, the way a light goes off in a building when the last person leaves — and the thing that was standing there knew my name and used it, and knew what I was afraid of, and used that too."

"Then what."

"Then it said thank you." Priya's hands were flat on her knees. "I have not slept more than two hours since. I've had the tests. There's nothing wrong with me. My heart is fine." She smiled, and it was the worst thing Nora had seen that year. "But he's coming back for the rest of it, and when he does I will not be here, and I want you to have the file. There's a drive in the flour jar. Come back Thursday."

Nora came back Thursday, at eleven, and got no further than the lawn.

Two vehicles, a paramedic with his hands in his pockets, a gurney that nobody was hurrying.

The paramedic told her to step back. Then, when she said Priya's name, he told her that Dr. Ranganathan had been gone a little over two hours, and that she should not go in.

"I was here a few days ago," Nora said. "She was going to show me something."

The paramedic had nothing for that. But Odáliz Reyes was standing at the open front door with the laundry bag still over her shoulder, and she looked at Nora for a long moment and then stepped aside, which was not the same as permission, and Nora went in anyway, and stood in the living room, and looked at the mirror over the couch.

The coat was no longer over it.