Page 9 of While I’m Still Here

Another silence, longer this time. “Are you at work?” she asks.

“Yes, why?”

“Oh,” she says it so sadly, with a small sniffle, that it sends a cold chill through me. I’m grabbing my jacket from the back of my chair before I think anything of it.

“I’m leaving.”

“What? Why?”

“Because something is clearly wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You are literally crying.”

“I am not.”

“Beatrice.”

“Don’t Beatrice me,” she snarks.

“I’m coming over.”

“No!”

“Too late.”

“I said no.”

“And I have decided to respect your wishes by completely ignoring them.”

Normally that gets me something. A laugh, an insult, at the bare minimum, an accusation that I’m a controlling bastard. This time, nothing. I stop with one arm halfway into my jacket. “Bea?”

Her breathing changes; that’s all. One little inhale that catches before it gets all the way in. Then she says, “I have cancer.”

Everything stops.

There are moments when the human brain does extraordinary things. It can solve equations that tell us why things fall to the ground because of gravity, create music, remember the exact smell of your grannie’s house twenty years after you last stepped inside it. Mine, apparently, hears the woman I’ve loved for most of my life say I have cancer and responds with: No, she doesn’t.

“No, you don’t,” I say.

Brilliant, Fletcher. Really fucking useful… Top-tier emotional support.

“Well, that’s a relief. I’ll phone the hospital and let them know you’ve overruled the biopsy.”

“Bea.”

“I’ll tell them that Colin Fletcher says no.”

“What do you mean, cancer?” The question is fucking stupid, because cancer means cancer, but I need her to say something else. Something that helps me rearrange those words into a sentence that doesn’t mean what I know it means.

She doesn’t.

I hear her breathing. “Breast cancer.”

My hand tightens around the phone. “When did you find out?”

“Today.”