Sarah had always been the master of her own choices, her direction in life; she was the archetypal executive: ‘A person having administrative or supervisory authority in an organization, who makes decisions and puts them into action.’ But now, she was being subjected to other people’s decisions. She felt betrayed, disowned, like a woman scorned, one who has fallen short of expectations and been judged inept, inadequate, useless.

She had broken through the glass ceiling, only to hit the invisible wall that separated the healthy and the sick. She was in the second camp now, weak and vulnerable. Johnson and his fellow partners were burying her alive. They had tossed her body into a ditch and now they were covering her slowly with shovel after shovel of smiles and false sympathy. Professionally, she was dead. She knew it. As if in a nightmare, she was the helpless spectator of her own burial. She could shout and scream that she was there, alive and kicking inside the coffin, but no one was listening. Her torment felt like a hideous waking dream.

Every last one of them was lying. They told her to ‘be strong’, that she ‘would get through this’, but their actions said the exact opposite. They had dropped her. Like a broken piece of furniture left out for collection. She was blacklisted.

She had sacrificed everything for her work, and now she was the sacrificial victim, on the altar of cost-efficiency and performance. Here, it was sink or swim. She could go right ahead and drown now.

Her plan had failed. Her wall had collapsed, undermined by Inès’s naked ambition. She had been overtaken on the inside by Curst, with Johnson’s blessing. She had thought he at least might have been on her side, or have tried to help her, but he had deserted her without a second thought. He had taken from her the one thing that had kept her on her feet, the one thing that had given her the strength to get up each morning: her place in society, her professional life, that feeling of being somebody in this world, of belonging.

The thing she dreaded had finally come to pass: Sarah had become her cancer. She was her own tumour personified. No one saw the brilliant, elegant, high-performance, forty-something woman, only the embodiment of her illness. To them, she was no longer a lawyer who happened to be ill, she was a walking illness which happened to be a lawyer. It was an important difference.

Cancer scared people, it isolated them, pushed them away. It stank of death. People preferred to turn away, holding their noses.

Untouchable: that was what Sarah had become. Relegated to the margins of society.