It was a hot July day in the mountains of Virginia. The earth swam in a faint blue haze of heat that rose from river and cliff.

Daniela and I walked side-by-side on a path alongside the train tracks, with scrub brush and the occasional mesquite tree on either side.

For a moment she pictured herself living somewhere else. Somewhere far away where women fixed things in order to live.

Surrounded by distant relatives he’d never met and couldn’t remember, the old surgeon lay wheezing in his deathbed, clutching the small model of a human heart.