It's fascinating because it's so personal, but more than that, it reads like a mirror held up to her own life. She has a lost love, too, divorced for two years, every hour wanting her ex-husband, Roger, back. She's made the same skimpy, half-hearted lists, has even balled up love notes.

Friends have been urging her to break loose and live. One insisted she accept an invitation to an international literary conference in Caracas, celebrating Venezuela's most famous poet, Ana Enriqueta Terán. The invitation had come because she has translated Terán, written about her influence on American poets including herself. The trip would be paid for by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. How could she not go?

The drawback was Zika, a Venezuelan virus everywhere in the 2015 news. The symptoms, in early reporting, were said to be mild in adults, but now it was clear it caused microcephaly—abnormally small heads—in newborn babies. She does her research. It's been confirmed: the disease is spread by mosquitoes. One can be protected from them with the usual lotions, bug repellents. It has also long been thought to be transmitted sexually, but that's something she can avoid.

So she goes, and it is far more than she expected or hoped for. She's warmly received, and given the honor of reading her work in the famed Aula Magna auditorium at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, just as Terán herself did years ago. Many in the audience have read Felicity's book, Abyssal Bitch, Breathing the Future. At a party afterward, she has the most stimulating intellectual conversations she's had in years, and at a later, more intimate dinner one young man seems especially attracted to her. He's wearing open-toed sandals and a beautiful linen Havana shirt. His name is Eucario and his hair keeps falling in his face. He says his grandfather knew Ana Terán, had loved her when they were young. But alas his grandfather was only Ana's love of the week. Felicity of course knows all about this, and laughs—she likes this Eucario very much. He teaches at a university in Cartagena. At the end of the evening he asks her to spend the night with him. She's thrilled.

But something holds her back. It's Zika. Earlier a mosquito buzzed her ear in the hotel bar, in spite of her lotion, and now she obsesses on it. In the window mosquitos are swarming the restaurant veranda. Just yesterday she heard about a new World Health Organization report that Zika can hide in a young woman's body undetected only to cause microcephaly in her baby years later. She tells Eucario, "I can't tonight." She knows it makes no sense to him. She touches her hand to his cheek and says, "I can't explain."

He seems hurt, but only for a moment. Then he offers to take her to Guarenas in the morning. A day trip to visit the neighborhood where Ana Terán grew up. "Yes," she says, grateful and anxious. Yet back in her hotel room she obsesses about the mosquitos, inspecting the bath, looking everywhere, slathering repellent on her face, neck, arms, and at last collapsing into bed, pulling the sheet over her head.

The next morning, Eucario surprises her by being a no-show. Relieved, angry, humiliated, she leaves the conference early and gets the last seat on a night flight back to Boston.

When the cabin lights dim she turns on her personal light and reads on. Compared to Eucario, this notebook lover, Armando, seems a fool. His words are honest, but clumsy and innocent. His lover has apparently said he thinks too much about work, too little about her. In his denial he says he loves her more than any building he could construct. She wants to tell Armando, Don't listen to her. When her husband left he said much the same of her work, long nights at her desk, dreaming more than writing. Don't give up your beautiful floating buildings, she thinks, and turns off her light. Quietly, in the darkness, she begins to cry for Armando, and for herself.

At last she goes to the lavatory, blots her eyes and nose. In the light over the mirror she looks ghastly and understands she's been lying to herself. Her husband didn't divorce her because she worked too much. It was because he wanted children and she didn't. She wasn't ready, and he was impatient. Last night she had panicked, thinking if she got Zika she would have to delay children even longer, losing Roger forever. It was crazy to reject Eucario because—besides the mosquitos—she couldn't let her husband go. Her friends would call it self-sabotage, one of the common effects of divorce, like shame and depression. Now she saw what self-sabotage meant. The knowledge was bitter yet came over her with a calm, merciful clarity, like a fever breaking.

A rapping at the lavatory door startles her and a flight attendant asks if she's all right. "Okay," she calls and flushes the toilet, a loud blast, to signal she's done. No one's there when she steps out into the aisle.

The cabin is quiet. Down the aisle she feels her life calming. She can breathe, and wants to share this with Armando. He needs to let his lover go. When she stops at her row, she has a revelation.

An airline cleaning crew would not leave a personal item like a notebook in a seat-back pocket. The journal must have been left after they cleaned. Therefore Armando is still on the airplane. There had been a long line in passenger boarding. He could have been one of the first, unknowingly taking her assigned seat, unloading personal items before realizing he was in the wrong seat. Flustered, he gathered his things but missed the journal, and moved away.

Felicity's heart is hammering. Directly across the aisle, in the same row, is a man who looks like he might keep a journal. He's absorbed, reading a thick book. Young middle-aged, wearing glasses with fashionable frames—like an architect? A man who might jot soy ginger salsa in a grocery list?

She leans toward him, holding onto the back of a seat, projecting her voice over the hum of the aircraft. "Excuse me. Are you Armando?"

He looks up. She smiles. "Armando?" He shakes his head in irritation and returns to his book.

She drops into her own seat, face hot, as if she's done something crazy. Heart still thumping, gradually she settles. Her idea is still valid. Armando could be in the row behind her, or ten rows back. She peers toward the rear of the aircraft and her heart sinks. Although the cabin has dimmed, there are still islands of light, people reading, some with faces lit by screens. But the flight attendants have begun food service, two carts blocking the aisle. Her search will have to wait.

Her energy begins to drain. She hardly slept the night before. She has no appetite. She has the notebook and Armando's name. It's a long flight. Somehow she will find him before they land in Boston. When the cart comes, she refuses dinner. All she wants to do now is sleep, or at least rest.

Soon she is dozing off, with reveries connected to memories. The intermittent soft cries of a baby somewhere in the cabin become the whine of mosquitos in her ear at the hotel bar last night. Deeper into the foggy vision, she is escaping the men. She's not searching for Armando, he's searching for her. He wants a baby but she's not ready. Just like Eucario, in his sandals, leaning close the night before, he wants a girl. And Roger, always Roger, demanding a baby from her, no matter the gender. She pleads for Ana Terán's help but can't find her.

Her sleep becomes by turns more wakeful and deeper. The baby cries again and it seems there is a swarm of mosquitos all the way to Boston. Coming up from the fog for a moment she sees something hanging over the seat back in front of her, a sweater or scarf, which becomes the wings of a huge mosquito. It's beautiful, not terrifying, its diaphanous wings folded around it like a delicate blanket. Then it fades away.

The next thing she hears is the ding tone before the captain announces, "We'll be landing in Boston in a few minutes." Groggy, she gathers her things. Once they land she joins the other weary passengers in the aisle, eager to deplane, and only when she's about to exit remembers Armando's notebook. She's left it behind in the seat next to hers. The other passengers are pushing her out. After the briefest panic she lets go of it altogether. After all, Armando is only the words he composed on a page. In truth she knows almost nothing about him.

She comes up out of the jet bridge into a sparsely populated terminal, the other passengers streaming past her. In the dawn light reflected in closed shop windows, she remembers her vision on the airplane of the mosquito's wings, how beautiful they were. Then, waiting for her bag at the carousel, she thinks she'll never be afraid of mosquitos again. She feels afloat in a cloud of elation. She doesn't know why. It's too strong for just being glad to be back home in dreary old Boston. Then she remembers a line in one of Ana Terán's poems, about setting right "her deal struck with happiness." No one at the conference knew what it meant. Not exactly. After all, Ana was always enigmatic.

But rolling her bag through the sliding doors, out to the curb, stepping down into the road to hail a cab, fresh dawn air on her face, Felicity suddenly understands what happiness is.

She really does want a baby, after all.

It won't be Roger's. Or the baby of any of the men who have tormented her. Or of anyone else she knows now.

Her happiness will happen because it's part of her future. Hers, Felicity's.

A cab stops, the cabbie takes her bag, and asks where she's going. She stands bewildered for a moment, before she remembers her address.