The parcel rustles in her lap and Audrey looks at the present wrapped in shiny silver paper decorated with tiny stars. Zoe has been fascinated by stars ever since she was little. Whenever she has been asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she has always replied that she plans to be an astronomer, to uncover the mysteries of the universe, as though such an ambition is entirely within her grasp. Now people no longer ask Zoe the question.

Audrey wonders about putting the gift on the chest of drawers next to the Walkman that gets less and less use as the days go by. The present is a double cassette of Now That’s What I Call Music! 11 and Audrey hopes it will help turn up the brightness behind Zoe’s eyes.

She thinks back to the previous week, to how brave Zoe had been as the nurses had hooked a bag of medicine to the tall metal stand, as drugs had dripped through the transparent plastic tube into her vein to engage in yet another battle against Zoe’s defective bone marrow. Audrey thinks about the dozens of times Zoe has had to endure this process: all the times she has vomited into disposable cardboard bowls, all the times she has been unable to lift her head from the pillow because it makes her stomach churn, all the times she has looked down at her arms, her legs, her jutting hip bones, and questioned the bruises that seem to materialize overnight. She thinks about all that Zoe has had to withstand and her heart strains with the injustice of it and with the guilt that she is unable to take away Zoe’s pain. Keeping your child safe, keeping her free from harm: these are a mother’s primary tasks and Audrey has failed to fulfill them.

How many more times do I have to have that done, Mummy?

Zoe’s words haunt Audrey as she remembers how, at the end of last week’s chemotherapy session—as Audrey had wiped traces of vomit from her daughter’s lips, shortly before Zoe had begun to throw up again—Zoe had looked up, her expression fixed with a determination not to complain, and asked Audrey the question.

Not too many more, my love. Not too many more.

The ambiguity of her reassurance had grasped at Audrey’s throat.

She runs her fingers gently across Zoe’s scalp where once her hair had been. An image slips into her head that she feels should belong to another era but which she knows belongs only to the recent past. An image of Zoe, twelve months ago, soon after her second chemotherapy session, scratching her head and pulling back her hand to discover a clump of her beautiful dark, wavy hair in it. The confusion on her face, and then the horror, before the tears had welled up and tipped over onto her cheeks. The strength Audrey had needed in order to hold back her own tears, to clasp Zoe in her arms, to whisper into her ear that it was all going to be OK, that Mummy was there, that she would take care of her.