After I’d eaten two slices of cake Mum said I didn’t have to help clear up the dishes because it was my birthday, so Dad and I sat in the front room listening to Nina Simone and while I was singing along to “The Look of Love,” Dad reached over and squeezed my hand and said I was every bit as good a singer as Nina Simone. I laughed and told him he was being daft, but I couldn’t help hoping that maybe there was a tiny bit of truth in it and that perhaps one day I might actually get to sing on a stage.

Now I’m lying on my bed, thinking about the fact that it’s true what people say—you do feel different when you’re sixteen. Before today I felt as though everything was fixed, as though my entire life had already been decided for me. But now I feel as though the whole world is out there waiting for me, just as long as I’m brave enough to go out and grab it.

Audrey read the extract three times, her hands shaking. She remembered writing that entry as if it were yesterday: lying on her bed, diary propped up on the pillow, pen in hand, and feet crossed at the ankles, the voices of contestants on Call My Bluff filtering through the flat’s thin partition wall from the sitting room next door.

Where, she wondered, had that optimistic sixteen-year-old girl gone? What had happened to her hopes and dreams, her belief that anything was possible? When had her aspirations evaporated?

Audrey scanned the diary entry again, cataloguing the ways in which she’d let down her sixteen-year-old self. She had no university degree, nothing to service the promise of her A-level results. She’d never been to New York, hadn’t managed any international travel beyond the occasional family camping holiday to France. She’d never sung on a stage, in America or anywhere else. Instead she’d spent her life as a wife, a mother, and a school librarian, and as much as she’d enjoyed her job, there was no deluding herself that her career had set the world alight.

Staring at the diary, Audrey felt as though somewhere in those pages were the answers to questions she wasn’t yet able to articulate. There seemed to be such an immeasurable distance between the life she had imagined for herself and the life she had led.

How, Audrey thought, do you get to the end of your life and feel as though you’ve barely begun?

There were so many things Audrey would change were she afforded a second chance. But that wasn’t how life worked, she knew that. She’d had her chances and now it was too late. The lump in her breast had made certain of that.

Perhaps, with treatment, she might have been able to extend the time her oncologist had predicted she had left. Perhaps she might survive twenty-two months, or twenty-four, rather than the eighteen months she had been given. But Audrey had her reasons for refusing chemotherapy and no amount of cajoling—by Lily, Jess, her granddaughters, or her oncologist—would persuade her to change her mind.