Johnny kissed Kate’s cheek and left the room.

“The only good thing about being rich and famous,” Tully said, “well, there are lots of good things about it, but one of the best is that if you call Nordstrom’s and say please send me every prom dress you have in sizes four through six, they do it.”

Marah came to the side of the bed. “I couldn’t pick out my first prom dress without you, Mom.”

Kate didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or cry, so she did both.

“Don’t worry,” Tully said. “I explicitly told the saleswoman to leave the skanky dresses in the store.”

At that, they all laughed.

As the weeks passed, Kate felt herself weakening. Despite her best efforts and her purposely optimistic attitude, her body began to fail in a dozen little ways. A word she couldn’t find, a sentence she couldn’t finish, a trembling weakness in her fingers that wouldn’t still, a nausea that all too often became unbearable, and the cold. She was always chilled to the bone.

And then there was the pain. By late July, when the nights began to grow longer and had the sweet sultry taste of a ripe peach, she had nearly doubled her morphine dosage and no one cared. As her doctor said, “Addiction isn’t your problem now.”

She was a good enough actress that no one seemed to notice how weak she was becoming. Oh, they knew she had to use the wheelchair to get to the beach, and that she often fell asleep well before the nightly movie started, but in these days of summer, the household was in a constant state of flux. Tully had taken over Kate’s daytime routine as best she could, which left Kate time to work on her journal. Sometimes, lately, she worried that she wouldn’t have time to finish it, and the thought scared her.

The funny thing was that dying didn’t. Not so much anymore. Oh, she still had panic attacks when she thought about The End, but even those were becoming less frequent. More and more often, she just thought: Let me rest.

She couldn’t say that, though. Even to Tully, who’d listen to her for hours and hours. Whenever Kate brought up the future, Tully flinched and made a smart-ass comment.

Dying was a lonely business.

“Mom?” Marah said quietly, pushing the door open.

Kate forced herself to smile. “Hi, honey. I thought you were going over to Lytle Beach today with the gang.”

“I was going to.”

“What changed your mind?”

Marah stepped forward. For a moment, Kate was disoriented by the sight of her own daughter; she’d had a growth spurt again. At almost six feet, she was filling out, too, becoming a woman before Kate’s eyes. “I need to do something.”

“Okay. What is it?”