‘Will you stop making me call you Juliet?’

‘It’s my name!’ she shouted.

‘Not to me it isn’t,’ he shouted.

They both wanted to storm off but there was nowhere to go.

‘We’re going home, Juliet,’ he said.

‘I hate you, Davey,’ she shouted, and after that they ate in awkward silence.

Chapter Thirty-Two: Grace

Chapter Thirty-Two

Grace

IN THE YEAR AFTER Rabbit’s death, Grace’s life became a series of medical appointments and theoretical arguments around her options and the course of action she should or shouldn’t take. She had appointments for mammograms, MRIs, counselling and psychotherapy, and appointments for an oncologist and then appointments for a second opinion, more mammograms, MRIs, psychotherapy, and it went on and on. Her life was reduced to a file of papers that was growing thicker each week and a schedule full of hospitals and doctors’ offices, and all the while a bomb ticked away inside her. The mammograms were sore, the MRIs terrifying and the counselling painful, not just because Grace had to talk about how she felt, and listen to Lenny, who was wholly unsupportive of her doing anything other than monitoring the bomb and waiting for it to go off. The argument around that was repetitive and unproductive.