About the Publisher

Prologue

Now

Joe

They’ve told me I’m dying. A doctor in a white coat, and a blue shirt with a stripy navy tie that had a coffee stain on it, had perched on the end of my bed and adopted a very serious expression on his face.

A nurse – who I had heard give out to her colleagues about the lack of resources on the ward and how she was getting ‘sick, sore and tired of working her arse off’ for too much responsibility and not enough money – had pulled the clinical blue curtain around my bed to afford me some privacy.

Her sombre expression mirrored that of the doctor, although it was clear it was a front. It was almost the end of her shift. This was a life-changing moment for me – the moment I heard I was condemned to die despite all the chemotherapy and surgery that they had been able to offer. For Katrina the nurse, with her short brown hair and ice-blue eyes, it was just the end of another shift. And she was tired. She had to do this final grim task before she clocked out and went home. She’d get a cup of tea, or coffee, or maybe a glass of wine (she seemed the type). She’d kick off her shoes and watch something mindless on the TV. She might even laugh if it was funny.

I doubted she’d think about me and the fact that I was dying. That no more could be done for me. I was already in the past tense for Katrina.

I was feeling sorry for myself, but that was allowed, wasn’t it?

I wasn’t that old. This shouldn’t have been happening yet.

I didn’t deserve this.

I wanted to scream that I didn’t deserve this.

But it was like there was a tiny voice, or a chorus of voices, whispering in her ear that this is exactly what I did deserve. In fact, I deserved much, much worse.

Chapter One

Heidi

Now

The back seat of my car is full to bursting. Lily is bundled up in her car seat, asleep and blissfully ignorant of the strained atmosphere between her fellow passengers. A weekend bag, filled with pyjamas and underpants to be laundered, a toilet bag containing a razor, toothbrush, soap and shaving foam sits beside her.

A plastic ‘Patient’s Property’ bag sits in the footwell. It’s loaded with boxes of medication, dressings, instructions that I will have to will my postpartum brain into reading and understanding once we are back at Joe’s house.

I won’t call it home. It ceased to be my home the moment my mother died – also from cancer. Unlike Joe McKee, the man who has played the role of my father for the past twenty-one years, she didn’t deserve it.

‘Did you lift my slippers?’ Joe asks as I help him ease his seat belt on. He is still sore – still tender from the operation to try to remove the tumour found in his lung. Except that they found it had company, all through his body. ‘Riddled with it,’ he said, sadly, when he told me.