“Do you want me to get someone for help? Your mother?”

I shake my head fervently. That’s the last thing I need, her overreacting.

“I’m OK,” I manage to say softly. “I just need to rest a minute.”

“OK.”

“You can go on without me. I’ll be there soon.”

He tilts his head. “I’ll wait, if it’s all the same with you.”

I nod.

I concentrate on my breathing, counting each breath in and holding it before releasing. It works and I start to feel my pulse settle and my head clear.

“Better?” he asks when I straighten up. He fills my presence with his vitality and health, and I don’t want to be sick in front of him, or weak. I want, just for one day, to pretend otherwise. I allow myself to imagine that I am a model and on location for an exotic photo shoot. I am his muse, his Yoko Ono. He is infatuated with me.

“Yes, thank you. Must be the heat.”

“Look, Ava.” He shuffles one foot in the dirt and decaying leaves. A twig snaps. The tui takes flight, its wings powerfully thumping through the air. I feel a sense of dread at what’s coming, and my dream evaporates and swiftly follows the tui into the ether.

“I don’t really know what to say, you know, about what you’re going through,” he continues awkwardly. “But I also don’t want to not say something, either. If that makes any sense.”

Cancer firmly inserts a foot between us, refusing as always to remain in the background.

“It’s OK,” I say. “I understand. I probably wouldn’t know what to say either, if the situation was reversed.”

“For what it’s worth, you seem like a really nice person.”

“Oh, I am,” I say, without a trace of modesty but with more than a touch of bitterness. “I help old ladies across the road, pay my taxes on time, step over worms after a rainstorm. I’m as nice as they come. And that’s why it doesn’t make any sense.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“It’s bullshit.”

“It is.”

“And not fair.”

“No.” His expression is hard to read as he looks at me. “You’re not like I thought you’d be.”

“Oh, really? And what exactly were you expecting?”

“I’m not sure.”

He holds my gaze, and I like the way he doesn’t flinch from the harsh truth. The ugliness of the disease is in the way it tries to alienate you from the healthy, those not afflicted. Whether they mean well or not, when you are dying, some people tend to act like you are already dead. And I get it, I do. Everything changes. It’s inconvenient. I remember at one family event, a wedding I think it was, not long after I was first diagnosed, I complained to my mother that I may as well have sat at home for all the attention anyone paid me.

“I feel like I’m a zombie in a horror film,” I’d complained. “No one will look me in the eye or engage in conversation. When I went to the toilet they parted in front of me like the bloody Red Sea. What are they scared of? That I’m contagious?”