Sarah keeps on walking. In the pocket of her coat, she holds the small card given to her by a woman she met at the hospital a few weeks before. They had been sitting in the same room waiting for their treatment, and had struck up a conversation, naturally, like two strangers on a café terrace. They had sat there chatting like that all afternoon, united by their illness – the invisible thread that bound them together. Their conversation had soon taken a more intimate, confessional turn. Sarah had read a great many personal stories in forums and blogs online. Sometimes, she almost felt she was part of a club, an enlightened band of women who knew, and who had gone through it. There were the hardened warriors, the Jedi, who had seen it all before. And then there were the neophytes, new to the disease, the Padawans – the ones who, like Sarah, had everything to learn. That day, the woman at the hospital – a Jedi, no doubt about it, fighting yet another battle in a long war, though she drew a veil over her own illness – had talked about a shop that sold ‘spare hair’, in her inimitable phrase. The staff were competent and discreet, she said. She had given Sarah a card with the salon’s address, for when the time came. In the fight to get well, no woman should lose her self-esteem, she said. The woman you see in the mirror should be your best friend, not your worst enemy, she added, with a knowing wink.

Sarah had put the card away and thought no more about it. She had tried to put off the inevitable moment, just as she had tried to deny the illness itself for so long, but reality had caught up with her.

The time has come. Sarah walks to the salon through the snowy streets. She could have taken a cab, but she chooses to walk. It is a kind of pilgrimage, a journey she must make on foot, a rite of passage.

Going there means a lot. It means accepting the illness at last. Not rejecting it, not denying its existence. Looking it in the eye, facing it, not as a punishment or a twist of fate, an unavoidable curse, but as a fact, a life event, a challenge to overcome.

As she draws nearer to the salon, Sarah has a curious feeling, not exactly déjà vu, not a premonition, no, this is something deeper, something that filters softly into her thoughts, her entire being, as if she has already made this journey, as if she knows the way. And yet this is the first time she has ever ventured into this neighbourhood. Inexplicably, it seems as if something is waiting for her there. Like a meeting that was arranged a long time ago.