Of course, she had seen that he was upset when she went to collect the results of her tests. The way he met her at the door and led her to the chair by his desk, then sort of perched on the corner, leaning towards her. She had said something like, it’s not good news, is it, and he said no, he was afraid not. The tumours in her chest had come back, and there were mets, secondaries in the brain. The brain, not hers. Not your brain, Alice. The brain. He asked her whether she wanted to see the images but she said she would take his word for it. After all, there was nothing very surprising. She had known perfectly well that something was wrong, something serious. Headaches that lasted two or three days. Squiggly lights at the edge of vision. And she had read the literature, she could practically recite it. Small-cell cancer was ‘aggressive’. It did not rest. She was lucky to have had the last two years.