She was a collector of stories without a story to tell.

She got up from her chair and went to the small, hermetically sealed window and leaned on the sill, rearranged her scarf around her neck. Chicken neck. Everything now felt scrawny; she’d lost fifteen pounds over the last few months and was always cold. Far below, between the hospital and the lakeshore, an artery of cars coursed east–west on the Queen Elizabeth Way. A white-and-green commuter train trundled past. Trees swayed. Cables and wires criss-crossed a sky that was a brilliant and searing autumn blue; the lake was a sparkling rich navy, choppy under the midday sun. All that life out there and not a sound of it passed through the window into this room.

This would be the third time Anouk needed intravenous antibiotics over the past year. The treatment would be like a deep-cleaning for the lungs, flowing into the tributaries and creeks that her oral medications couldn’t reach. She waited now for a specialist who would insert a large catheter into a vein in her arm.

What did she have to say about cheese. For the last two years her ability to find stories she wanted to tell was waning, along with her energy. She was thirty-eight years old, and having to live again with Nora because she wasn’t making enough money to live on her own. That’s how they talked about it – she and her mother – their story was one of finance, not of ill health. Because she had by now developed diabetes, and the IV treatments were playing with her memory, making it hard to keep track of other medications along with the blood sugar and all the rest of it. What seemed to be a beginning felt a lot like an end.

Anouk pressed her nose to the glass, which smelled of dust, and said to the treetops, said to the cars, said to a flap of small black birds tumbling bungling by: ‘Cheese.’

Soon after, a light knock at the door. A specialist nurse Anouk hadn’t met before peeked her head in and invited Anouk to another room, where she was asked to lie on an examination bed. Next to the bed, a trolley with several drawers. On top of the trolley, a metal tray of sterile instruments and tubing and all the detritus needed to insert the catheter that would be threaded through a vein in her arm and travel all the way to her heart. Anouk could tell by the way the nurse practitioner handled the components that she knew what she was doing. Sometimes, these people weren’t so confident, and their hands shook. They dropped things. Sometimes they would pick up one piece of kit and put it down before finding the right one, or they would make bad jokes or ask about where she had been on holiday, and in their eyes Anouk could see the need for her to make them feel okay, because they knew, after all, that it was really she, Anouk, who was the expert in the room.