Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

“I was there,” and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration.