“Okay. It is for me, too. I just don’t want you to be here because you . . . pity me.”

Radley rolled his eyes. “Kid, we all have shit that rains down on us at different times. Your time is now. My time was getting beaten up in high school and having my parents tell me I was going to hell. Should we get Chinese? Korean? Thai? Italian?”

They ordered Thai food. Josh walked the two blocks to the nearest packie to pick up beer while Radley sat in a lounge chair in the rooftop garden and pretended to be Leonardo DiCaprio (in his own words).

When he came back, it was a little bit of a shock, seeing the not-Lauren things in the living room. His heart hurt.

But she would like Radley. Would have liked. She’d be glad he had a friend. That he was (oh, detested phrase) moving on.

Tomorrow, he would apologize to Sarah. For now, he tucked the six-pack under his arm and went up on the roof to join his buddy. Like a normal person, no matter how empty his soul felt.

18

Lauren

Twenty-one months left

May 19

Dear Dad,

I think this diagnosis is kind of wrong. I mean, I believe the doctors, but I doubt very much I’m like the other patients. I’m not even thirty, for God’s sake. I’m about to turn twenty-seven. They keep saying they don’t know how this will play out.

It’s really not that bad, to be honest. I’m fine. I’m really fine.

Just wanted you to know.

Love,

Lauren

She was fine. Until she wasn’t.

In June, six months after the diagnosis, she was doing great. IPF and its grim facts lurked in her closet like a childhood monster, amorphous and dark, waiting. But that monster had never eaten her, had it? So then. Everything made sense.

Because it didn’t seem possible that she had something incurable. She’d never even heard of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Some days, she felt perfectly normal. Better than normal, even. So how could her lungs be changing, huh? Hm? Hadn’t she given Sebastian a piggyback ride? Hadn’t she and Josh had marathon sex the other day?

She was slaying at work, proving herself again and again. How could she be dying if she was the company’s best exterior space designer? Bruce had just assigned her to a big job for a new T stop in Boston, and she’d spent the day in Beantown, all alone, watching people come and go, reading the pedestrian traffic flow report and staring at the ugly entrance. She was fine. Fine, damn it.

There had to be a mistake. She was just waiting for Dr. Bennett to figure it out.