“Recovery wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t get shitfaced every time you sing,” I tell her.

She shrugs. “You know it helps.”

Only a select few people in the world know how much Amanda struggles with stage fright.

“I suppose I’d better shower,” I say reluctantly.

“What time are they coming?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“Isn’t that rather early for journos to be out and about?” Kate comments.

“Early bird catches the story, or something like that.”

“I thought it was worm.”

“Far too early for me, anyway,” Amanda grumbles.

Standing in the shower and letting the hot water massage my body, I take a few deep breaths, trying to quell the nerves I feel at being interviewed for a major women’s magazine, one with a readership of roughly half a million women each week. Five hundred and ninety-four thousand, to be precise. I know this because I stupidly googled it last night when I couldn’t sleep. Now I’m terrified about saying something stupid for all those women to read.

The only reason I agreed to this interview in the end was to raise awareness. Specifically, that it can also be a young women’s disease. Free mammograms are only offered to women over the age of forty-five in this country, and while I’ve read the stats and agree that, yes, more women in that age group are affected, there is also a troubling trend of young women such as myself being diagnosed. Worse, we are often misdiagnosed, or diagnosed too late, once the cancer has metastasized and become harder or, as in my case, unable to be cured.

Some doctors, such as the one I saw, don’t place enough seriousness on lumps or bumps or dimples or any other such symptoms of the disease when it presents in someone under the age of thirty-five.

And that has to change.

“You have the opportunity to make a difference here,” Amanda had said when she and Kate were trying to sell the idea to me. Cunningly, they’d roped my mother in on the cause. Her love of glossy printed pages is tremendous, and the thought of her only daughter being on the pages of one was enough to make her actually, physically, quiver.

“Just think, darling,” Mum said. “They’d make you all glamorous for the photo shoot. They bring their own wardrobe and makeup people, you know. And hairstylists. You’d look amazing.”

“And you could make a difference to someone’s life. By increasing awareness,” Amanda said again with a pointed look at Mum.

“Oh, yes. And that,” Mum said.

She had a point. If I could save just one person from going through what I’ve been through and am now facing, by catching their own cancer in the early, highly treatable stages, it’d be worth any misgivings on my part.

I don’t know what exactly I’d been expecting, but the reporter, when she arrives, isn’t it. She blows into the house like a southern wind, all purple hair and sweeping kaftan, the bracelets on her wrists jangling like wind chimes. She stops in the center of the lounge and does a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, and then nods to herself. “Yes. This will do.”