By midmorning, when I finally summoned the courage to open my laptop, it was to a barren inbox, apart from a message from my boss, Angela, offering her condolences but curtly suggesting I start my sick leave immediately. Angela normally monologued for hours, we staff writers listening patiently, hoping that by the time she stopped talking about herself she’d want to hear our story ideas, but chances were we’d all have died from old age by then. Today, however, she’d got straight to the point.

There were no messages from my normally loquacious girlfriends, either, which spoke volumes. My best friends, Jaynie and Debbie, had blocked me on Facebook and Twitter, which said it all, really, loud and clear. I’d have to get a change of address card marked ‘Social Siberia’.

My mother had left a message on my landline in her most severe, church-pew voice. ‘You’ve disgraced the whole family. Consider yourself well and truly out of my will’ – a pointless gesture if I had been dying but a rather annoying development now that I wasn’t. My mother had never let self-doubt cloud her judgement. She loved to hate things. She could write off whole countries without even going there, whole nationalities without meeting any members of them – and daughters with the stroke of a pen.

‘You’ve always been a drama queen, Ruby. Chemo will sort you out,’ she post-scripted in a blasé tone, as though offering me a stale scone. ‘At times like this you need to crack hardy.’

Or just crack up, possibly.

Harry’s voicemail message was furious and confused in equal measure. ‘You disgraced and libelled me in front of all our mates. As if I could ever cheat on you. That stupid shit on my phone . . . It was just silly banter with an old client. Oh, and thanks for telling everyone I’m bad in bed. That added the fucking icing to the happy fucking birthday cake. But I’m putting your insane behaviour down to this shit-awful disease, which we can fight together. Because . . . I love you,’ he added, tonelessly, ringing off.

Anger welled up in me – anger bitter enough to taste. Love? The bastard had given me a worm farm for my birthday. A bloody worm farm. I wanted to feed him to the worms at that moment, that’s for sure. I’d trusted him completely. We were a team. We shared so many in-jokes about our kids, our friends, even our mortgage, threatening to go along to a police line-up to identify the house that was attempting to steal our wallets.