At the beginning of August, Sybil had been moved from her apartment in Montreal to her mother’s home in Greenley, Ontario. She wasn’t as far from Addie now—only an hour from Wilna Creek. Sybil had other family members in Greenley besides her mother: a married brother and his wife, a niece, an uncle. Caring people who could be relied on to provide solid support. But Addie was Sybil’s closest friend. She and Sybil were each other’s de facto family.

Sybil’s mother and brother had recently begun to turn to Addie for decisions that had to be made, asking questions that were impossible to answer. Today, before Addie drove back to Wilna Creek, Sybil’s mother had stopped her on the front step and pleaded: “How much time does she have left?” Addie did not want to reply. How could she know? Being forced to contemplate her friend’s death was difficult enough. She hugged Sybil’s mother on the doorstep and the two cried quietly, being careful that Sybil, in her bedroom down the hall, wouldn’t hear.

Addie held power of attorney. She and Sybil had appointed each other the year they turned forty. Now they were forty-nine. Neither of them had anticipated this. This being the blatant, real and obscene fact that one of them was dying.

Addie had casual friends, but no one as close as Sybil. Not counting Tye. The marriage was over, but she and Tye kept in touch occasionally by phone. He worked in the field of bioethics. She had met him in Montreal. Her friendship with Sybil had also begun there, but that was before she met and married Tye.

Thirty years ago, on their first day of university and while standing as two strangers in a slow-moving line of students, she and Sybil waded through registration procedures on the McGill campus. It was a sunny September day, a day filled with promise. After the first half hour, while inching forward and making barely discernible progress, they agreed on a plan for lunch. The two had been friends ever since. Reliable, loving, lifelong friends. Sybil worked her way up to becoming a professor in the nursing faculty several years after graduation, and she continued to teach, deriving enormous satisfaction from her job. Addie studied administration in health services. After completing her studies, she stayed on in the city. When her marriage broke down, she made the decision to relocate; she needed a new start. She responded to an ad and moved to Ontario, accepting an administrative position at the Wilna Creek Hospital. Eventually, she became the unit manager responsible for the large and newly expanded Danforth Wing.

Addie had always been comfortable around hospitals, even as a teenager. Her late mother had trained to be a nurse in a hospital school, but after graduate studies, she’d worked as a psychiatric nurse on the locked wards of one of the old Victorian-era institutions—of the kind that were probably no longer in existence. When Addie was in senior high, she sometimes met her mother after school so they could drive home together. Her mother was part of a large family, and Addie still had aunts, uncles and cousins in Quebec and New Brunswick. Sadly, no one made much of an effort to stay in touch now that her mother was dead. Some individuals were key to keeping families together, and that was a fact of life. Addie’s father was not one of these; he had remarried and moved to Spain, and was now living in Sitges.