She noticed a stack of unopened post which had piled up over the previous week. She mindlessly flicked through it as she walked up the stairs: bills mostly, a catalogue from a holiday company she’d used once ten years ago, and then as she opened the door to her bedroom a small white envelope fell to the floor. With scribbled handwriting and no corporate stamp, it looked like a card. She opened it, expecting to see an invite of some sort or maybe a mass card from a neighbour who’d heard Rabbit was dying. Dead. She’s dead now. She’d closed her bedroom door before she realised it was from St James’s Hospital where she’d had her BRCA gene test a few weeks before. Her heart and pulse gathered pace, banging like a drum in her neck and wrists. Her palms sweaty, her knees weak, eyes suddenly unfocused, the words seemed to float off the page. She was positive for the BRCA2 gene. The actual gene identifying under BRCA2 was written and presented as a long serial number. Is that the same number that killed Rabbit? The letter went on to say that she was on the high-risk register and advised her to make an appointment with a counsellor. Her knees slowly gave way and she allowed herself to sink to the floor where she curled up into a ball, hugged herself tightly and cried her heart out.

Grace had dithered about taking the test since her sister’s diagnosis four years previously. She’d spoken to her mother about whether or not it was a good idea. Of course Molly didn’t want to talk about it and thought it was a terrible idea. ‘You look for trouble, you find trouble.’

‘But Rabbit has cancer, Ma.’

‘I don’t have cancer. I’m in my seventies. Rabbit was just unlucky.’

‘Rabbit has the gene.’

‘Because she’s fucking unlucky.’

‘Yeah, but where did it come from?’ Grace asked. ‘Do you think cancer stopped Nanna Mulvey’s heart?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, cancer doesn’t give you a heart attack.’

‘What if she had it and she didn’t know?’

‘Cancer is hard to miss, love.’

‘What did her sister die of?’ Grace asked. Molly couldn’t remember – she’d died before Molly was born and Molly’s mother didn’t like to talk about her.

‘What age was she when she died?’

‘I don’t know, twenty-something,’ Molly said.

‘Crap. Maybe it was cancer.’

‘I think it was polio.’

‘Is that the one with the iron lung?’

‘That’s TB – your great-uncle Maurice had that, although it’s possible she had a touch of TB too, it was bleedin’ rampant back then.’

‘So polio and a touch of TB killed her?’

‘Who knows, love? If she was anything like my mother it was misery that did it in the end.’

‘Right,’ Grace said. ‘No cancer on your side, then?’

‘No cancer,’ Molly said.