“Morning,” Kate says, joining me outside with her freshly plunged Brazilian-imported coffee. I love the smell of it, but not so much the taste. She scans the coastline with a satisfied smile, as well she might. If this view was mine to wake up to for the rest of my life I’d be the same.

“Any plans for the day?” she asks, blowing on the surface of her coffee gingerly to cool it down.

“Wedding planning.”

Her eyebrows arch. “So you’re really serious about this whole wedding idea?”

The night before, we’d had a few drinks and I’d brought up the subject again. The treatment had been unsuccessful in halting the spread of the cancer, and I was more determined than ever not to waste whatever time I had left. As far as I was concerned, it was full steam ahead with the wedding.

“Yes. Now more than ever. I know it’s hard for you guys to understand, but it’s what I want.”

“Hey, I have no issue with it, but I think your mother’s worried the cancer has spread to your brain.”

I wince. That’s the thing with Kate being a GP. She’s become desensitized and says things without thinking how they might sound.

“Harsh, Kate.” Amanda emerges from inside and blinks in the daylight as if she’s been locked in a cellar for nine years.

“What, the sunlight?”

“No, you and your brain-cancer comment.”

“Oh, right.” Kate looks at me guiltily. “Sorry, Ava.”

“Fuck, this view is something else,” Amanda says, collapsing down onto a deckchair and looking around. She lifts her feet on to the small glass outside table in front of her and leans back contemplatively. “Seriously, I’d never leave home if I had this to look at every day.”

“I have to leave home to earn the money to pay for this view,” Kate points out.

Kate earns a decent salary due to a nationwide GP shortage, and one of the first things she did upon graduating and accepting a position back in our hometown was make an offer on this place. It sits almost on the tip of the small peninsula that shelters our small town from the open sea. The houses along this couple-of-hundred-meter-long stretch of land vary in style and price, due to the fact some have been here for decades and some are new builds. More and more of the old beach houses are being bulldozed to make way for city folks’ holiday homes, each trying to outdo the others with sleek angles and new materials and ground-breaking architectural designs.

We’re just half an hour and one large, windy hill away from the country’s third-largest city. Half an hour from a heaving metropolis of glass and concrete, where people walk so fast my mother says it’s a wonder their ankles don’t catch fire. Here the pace is much slower; ankles pause in the street to catch up with neighbors and friends. Deadlines are loose and appointment times vague.

Kate’s pride and joy is a neat 1950s-style beach house. A square box shape, it’s fashioned from weatherboard that she had repainted a nondescript gray, with cream on the wooden window frames. The section it’s perched on is steeply sloped, with a path that leads from the house down across the lawn and through a short section of native bush to the relatively private beach.