“Hi, Mom,” I said. “I brought your purse.” She mouthed hi at me, then closed her eyes.

The nurse wrote her name—Nancy—on a whiteboard and asked for mine. She put “daughter,” in parentheses.

“She’s been through the wringer,” Nancy said.

There were faces, happy to miserable, at the bottom of the board. She circled an expression of anguish. I rifled around in my mom’s purse for my phone, which I’d dumped in there before leaving the house, along with two Diet Cokes, one of them for her.

“Have her use the button if she needs anything,” Nancy said, and left.

I put down the purse, glanced at my mother. Her face was bloated, her eyelids thin and blue, as if her body had been dredged up from the bayou, where it had been dumped. That did happen sometimes. Quickly, I looked away. At my phone. My camera. I pointed the lens at the whiteboard, the faces, smiley to sad, then uploaded the image to Instagram. “Mood,” I typed and added to my story. Beyond the bed a wide window looked out on Rice University, rows of live oaks, brick buildings, the cross-country track like a leather belt, buckled around nobody. Someone had arranged a powder-blue chemotherapy recliner to take in the view. I went to it, propped my phone upright on the sill. I pushed the chair close to the bed and felt the effort in my breasts, a sharp, pulling pain. I hadn’t yet revealed them to my following. But before the surgery, Jake and I had planned a shoot: lunch at a Hollywood restaurant where Bella and Gigi had recently shot content of kale salads and turmeric tonics they posted to their feeds. I would order a burger, Jake said, sit in front of it and lift the hem of my top to show a hint of under boob. Did she or didn’t she? followers would ask, and fill my comments with conjecture.

I looked at my mom, tucked in bed, covers tangled like a feverish child. Lightly, she snored. I unzipped my hoodie, beneath which I wore a sports bra, and my new breasts looked obvious from some angles, dubious from others. “You want people to wonder,” Jake said when we planned the reveal. “But never really know.”