“It’s OK.”

“No, it’s not. None of this is OK.”

“That’s got to be the understatement of the year.” I smile, trying to break through her seriousness. Not that the situation doesn’t deserve her gravity, because of course it does. But if I only have a few months left I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend them being miserable all the time. The odd pity party is allowed, expected, even, but I’m not going to wallow there. She gives me a hopeless little smile. This isn’t fair on her either.

“When would you like to start treatment, Ava?” Dr. Harrison clicks his mouse to bring up a calendar, relieved to be back on familiar territory.

“As soon as possible,” Mum answers him. She looks at me. “Right?”

I look out the window at the sky. It is fiercely blue today, and almost empty barring a few scraps of cloud clinging to the hills. I feel like my senses have been heightened by my diagnosis, and I’m painfully aware that out there life is happening, all around. I hear traffic, voices, birds, and the distant hum of one of the small aircraft that fly tourists up and down the coast on sightseeing trips. Out there, new life is being created, people are taking their first breath, just as others are taking their last.

“Just so we’re clear.” I look Dr. Harrison straight in the eyes. “You can’t cure me, is that right?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“And these treatments, chemo and the like, they would merely be prolonging the inevitable?”

“Not necessarily prolong, no. It’s difficult to say. Best-case scenario we would buy you some time, yes.”

“But nothing is definite.”

“No.”

“So what’s the point?”

Mum stiffens. She has sensed where I’m heading.

Dr. Harrison scratches his head. “With treatment we can prevent some of the complications that may arise. We also hope to improve your quality of life, and of course manage your pain.”

“Basically you want to be able to look in the mirror before bed and say you did everything you could.”

He gives me a look that says I’m not being fair. “We do everything we can for all of our patients, Ava.”

“I believe you. But, Dr. Harrison”—I shuffle forward so I’m sitting on the front of my seat, my elbows on his desk—“I need you to cut the bullshit.”

Mum snorts and covers her eyes with her hands. She’s used to my bluntness, and while normally she’d make an effort to stop me, she correctly senses this is one of those moments in life when she needs to let me be an adult on my own terms.

Dr. Harrison looks both amused and wary. “I’m not bullshitting you, Ava.”

“Good. So the kind of chemo you’re suggesting is aggressive, yes?”

He nods.

“The kind like I had last time? That will leave me feeling so wretched and broken I’ll almost beg for death?”

He swallows but says nothing.

“I appreciate that you’re offering me options,” I say. “But I don’t want to waste a minute being falsely optimistic, and I don’t want to spend what little time I have left up here, having X-rays, and scans, and endless blood draws. Vomiting my guts out and losing control over my body and any dignity I still have. And I definitely don’t want that port back in my chest for you to pump drugs into me that will do just as much damage as they may, on the off chance, do some good.”