“Thanks,” I say, taking the tiniest sip of coffee. It is scalding hot.

“She okay?” he asks me.

I glance at you, not because I need to in order to answer the question, but because everything brings me back to you. Always.

“I think she’ll be fine,” I say, shrugging. “That was strange.”

“I don’t know how she went so deep so quickly,” Tom replies, raising his own mug to his face and blowing. “Especially for someone who can’t swim.”

The coffee smells comforting, familiar. I take another sip.

Sitting there on Tom’s deck, behind his house, at the end of his long lane, fills me with a feeling of isolation like I’ve never had before. We are so far from civilization. In front of us the lake spreads out, and the far bank isn’t visible, even on clear days. We are fifteen miles or so outside of the small town of Nysa, which is a forty-five-minute drive from the highway, which is an hour or two from any other place.

Part of me feels relieved to be so far away, so removed from the world. It’s like the further removed I am from normal life, the further removed I am from my diagnosis. If I can refrain from reaching up and touching the knot, I can almost believe it’s not there. Except for the tightening of my skin at the corner of my eye. And the dull ache that radiates down my neck.

But being far away also comes with a certain level of anxiety. What if I need emergency treatment? What if you break a bone or need a doctor?

What if Tom is not who I remember him to be, and we’re stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with him? What if he tries to do something?

“Amazing how much she resembles Mary,” Tom says.

It’s true. Of course I’ve noticed this before, but I don’t like the way he says it, so I take another sip of coffee and hope the subject will change.

“Do you remember when Mary told you she was pregnant with John?” he asks, and there is some strange element in his voice I can’t recognize.

“I’ll never forget it,” I reply, smiling.

“The four of us were in the diner, and it was late, wasn’t it? Like one or two in the morning. Someone said something about a baby.”

“You said you’d die if your mom had another baby.”

“Is that what it was? I guess it could have been. There were so many of us siblings.” He laughs, and I can’t help but smile.

“One too many, as far as I’m concerned,” I say.

He laughs again. “And Mary started crying.”

“Yeah, she was pretty upset. That’s when she said it. ‘Paul, would you die if I had a baby? Because I’m pregnant.’”

“When was that?”

“January or February, I guess. But when she said that, I thought I was going to have a heart attack right there in the diner.”