“Plus, they ended up coming back to our cottage, which was irritating . . . I mean, who drinks coffee at midnight?”

Carol sighed. “Oral surgeons, apparently. Do you have another plan for when you will tell her?”

“This weekend . . . but not if she gets her period.”

Carol frowned. “And why is that?”

“Well, I want to avoid her associating it with bad news.”

Carol nodded. “Wow. You’ve really thought this through.”

I remember it made me feel good she said that. I had thought it through. I was going to die and I was controlling elements of the aftermath with thoughtfulness and dignity.

“Though sometimes,” I remember admitting. “I do feel I’m a coward, which is perhaps why I’m putting it off.”

“If you were a coward, Max, I don’t think you’d be here now. Cowardice, or the fear of it, might be something we can trace to an event in childhood, a sense of powerlessness carried over.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. “But there’s little point in going into all that now.”

I didn’t have to explain why. Carol was great like that. She laughed, then reached for her box of menthol cigarettes, which meant our time was up.

As I was saying goodbye, Carol knocked her coffee, spilling it over the glass-topped table.

“Oh flup,” she said. “Would you mind telling my next appointment I’ll be a few moments?”

In the waiting room I found a man slightly younger than myself. Clean shaven but with hair in a messy side part.

“Carol asked if you’d wait a few minutes.”

“Is everything okay?”

“She spilled some coffee and is cleaning it up.”

“Oh. Thanks for letting me know,” he said, sweeping his hair to one side. “I don’t know what I’d do without Carol.”

“Me neither.”

The man stood and extended his hand. “I’m Jeremy Abrams.”

“How do you do?” I replied, shaking his hand. “Max Little.”

“The writer?”

You can imagine how thrilled I was.

But then Carol ruined the moment by suddenly appearing with a roll of paper towels. She looked at us without saying a word, then disappeared back into her office. The man turned and followed her in.

“Wish me luck, Max.”

As I waited for the elevator it suddenly occurred to me that Jeremy Abrams might also be dying (despite his abundance of hair).

Downstairs, I told the doorman I was waiting for my wife. He nodded, but it was obvious he didn’t care or suspect I was planning to ambush one of Carol’s other patients.

I sat on a bench in the faux-medieval lobby and wondered if Jeremy Abrams would find it unsettling that I waited for him. I was taking a risk. I knew that. He might even tell Carol and she’d stop seeing me.