“I’m fine.”

“You are a little flushed,” Kate adds.

“Want me to start the car?” Amanda asks, pushing her chair out.

“Guys, I’m fine,” I reassure them. “Really. Stop fussing. Can we please get back to the job at hand?”

“I call dibs on Food/Drink and Music,” Amanda says, picking up the folders.

“Naturally.”

“I’ll scout out some venues,” Mum says.

I open my mouth to speak.

“And no, not the surf club rooms either,” she adds. She picks up another folder. “Also I’ll have a chat with Christine about who did the flowers for her daughter Maxine’s wedding. They were nice. Do you remember them?”

“No.”

“Really? They were lovely. Roses, I think. And those little blue things. I don’t know all the names. Remember she had those funny stick things in the middle of the tables with the lights on?”

“I wasn’t there, Mum.”

“Weren’t you? Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Right, well, anyway,” Mum carries on. “I’ll do some research on the Internet. Find out what’s in season and what’s not. Leave it with me.”

“Dress is obviously your department,” Amanda says to me. “Although of course we’ll all come shopping with you if you’ll let us.”

I nod, because I don’t trust myself to speak. It just keeps hitting home, and I wish it wouldn’t. I’d love nothing more than to pretend that this is a normal wedding we are planning. To get caught up in the details and carried away by the frivolity of it.

“Great,” Kate says, picking up her papers and shuffling them. “We’ll reconvene here on Saturday—that should give everyone enough time to rustle up some initial quotes, et cetera.”

“Are you absolutely sure this is what you want?” Mum asks me.

I nod again.

“OK.” She smiles. “Then let’s organize you a wedding.”

Chapter Eleven

Wake up. Look.”

The voice is muffled but insistent.

“Ava, wake up,” it says again. Then something starts bouncing on the bed beside me, whacking lightly at my foot. I ignore it, burrowing my head deeper into the pillow. It took me hours to get to sleep the night before, and most of the nights before that. Cancer has a way of making you question everything, never letting your mind shut off.

Will I live long enough to finish this book I just started?

To see the final episode in this series?

To use all of this bottle of hand moisturizer I just purchased?

If we are all Here for a Reason, what was my reason? To live a life only remarkable by its complete lack of anything spectacular, then fizzle out at the grand old age of twenty-eight, leaving only a handful of people to mourn the world’s loss of me? I didn’t leave a legacy like Shakespeare, or whoever it was that invented the wheel.

I didn’t even have love. Not the real stuff, the good one. The one you read about.

“What’s going on in here? Is she OK?” Kate’s voice joins in, sleep still weighing down the syllables. I hear fear in her voice and that prompts me to roll over and blink open my eyelids.