Ifeoma found that Emeka, who had been hired for his distance from her world, understood her situation better than anyone in it — because he had already survived the thing she was facing, had already sat in the chair she kept putting other people in, had already learned the country of the terminal ward from the inside.

They were two people who had each been made solitary by grief, he by Adanna’s death and she by an illness that had emptied her life of everyone who wasn’t paid to stay, and they recognized in each other the specific loneliness of the person no one shows up for.

Recognition is how it starts.

Not attraction, not romance — recognition, the startled relief of being seen by someone who has been where you are.

By the second month, the guarded strangers had become something they had no word for and no clause to cover, and both of them, being cautious people who had lost too much, pretended for as long as they could that it wasn’t happening.

The man behind the effort to remove her watched every move.