It’s a week since the tests, and Vee is back in Mr Wilding’s office. The top of his desk is clear, save for a laptop which sits a little to his right, a vase of scentless, out-of-season roses and a box of tissues to his left. The tissues are within Vee’s easy reach. Of course they are.

She tried, briefly, in the waiting room, to talk herself into being a silly old woman worrying unnecessarily about a migraine or two. After all, she’s seventy years old. Parts of her ache that never used to. The small of her back, her hips, her knees all complain when she asks them for the slightest out-of-the-ordinary effort.

But as soon as her name was called, and she rose to walk through to the consultant’s office, she stopped all of her attempts at pretence as simply as other patients put down magazines when it was their turn to be seen. She’s been lucky to have a decade; the surgery last time was successful in a running-repair sort of a way, but it was always just a matter of time until the tumour in her brain started to grow again. The only thing that would stop it, really, would be death from another direction: heart attack, cancer somewhere else, wrong-place-wrong-time putting her in the path of terrorist action or car crash. Those fates have not come her way. It looks as though she has this one.

Mr Wilding swings his laptop towards her, ‘Here’s an image of your latest scan. You’ll see the scarring from the previous operation, here.’

Vee nods. The thick white line is the barrier between being able to remember the best part of two years, and a scattering of other memories. It blocks the taste of sweetness, the confidence to drive a car.

‘And, as was always a possibility, you’ll notice this cluster of marks here—’

‘Where are they?’

The consultant’s finger moves across the screen. It’s blunt-ended and far too normal-seeming for the delicate use he puts it to, coaxing out the interloping growths that have rooted themselves into brains. ‘Here,’ he says.

‘I meant’ – Vee shakes her head as though that will arrange her words into something clearer, closer to her thoughts – ‘I mean, which parts of the brain? What do those bits do?’

‘Ah.’ Mr Wilding sits back in his chair. ‘Well, as you know, the brain is complicated, and we don’t fully understand, for example, where and how memory is made and stored, how—’

‘Yes,’ Vee says, ‘I do know.’ She’s never had any tolerance for mansplaining, even before one of her younger sisters invented a word for it.

If Mr Wilding is annoyed by her interruption he doesn’t show it. ‘You’ll know, then, that we can’t say anything with certainty. The tumour will have roots in many other parts of the brain. Are you vomiting?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Seizures? Slurring?’