And so no, she would not go back there, to the arena that had condemned her to death. They wouldn’t see her fall. She wouldn’t make a spectacle of herself, offer herself up to the lions. She still had one thing – her dignity. The power to say ‘no’.

That morning, she hadn’t touched the breakfast tray that Ron had prepared for her. The twins had come to kiss her before school, they had snuggled next to her in bed. She hadn’t even responded to the touch of their small, warm, supple bodies. Hannah had begged her, trying everything to get Sarah up and out of bed: she had encouraged her, threatened her, made her feel guilty. But nothing worked. She knew she would find her mother in exactly the same place when she came home.

Sarah spent her days in a morbid, lethargic state; she felt increasingly numb. She drifted far away from the world. She thought back over the past few weeks in her mind, wondered what she might have done to change the course of things. Nothing, very probably. Play had gone on without her, and now it was game over. The end.

She had thought she could convince herself and everyone else that everything was fine, that nothing had changed. She had thought she could carry on as usual, stay on course, stand her ground, pretend. She had thought she could manage her illness, handle it like a new case, apply herself to the task methodically, and with determination. But it hadn’t been enough.

In a waking dream, she pictured her colleagues’ reactions to the news of her death. A macabre thought, but it pleased her, like choosing to listen to a sad song when you’re feeling unhappy, just to feed your mood. She could imagine their tearful faces, their feigned sorrow. The tumour was malignant, they would say; or, She knew this was the end. It was too late, they would say, assigning the blame to her. She waited too long to go to the doctor. They would find her guilty of hastening her own end. But the truth was quite different. The thing that was killing Sarah Cohen, consuming her like a slow-burning fire, was not merely the tumour that had taken possession of her body and was leading her now in this dance of death, with its cruel, unpredictable twists and turns; no, the thing that was killing her was her desertion by the people she had considered her peers, in the firm whose reputation she had helped build. The firm had been her life’s work, her reason to get out of bed in the morning, her ikigai, as the Japanese called it. Without it, Sarah no longer existed. She was a hollow creature, empty of substance, a weak, sick body.