Page 99 of While I’m Still Here

I sink further beneath the duvet. “That's actually reassuring.”

“I live to serve.”

For a few seconds I simply lie there, touching the breast I've spent weeks insulting, and allow myself to understand something I have been trying desperately not to understand. Cancer being inside it doesn't erase everything that came before cancer. I am allowed to hate what it has done without hating the body part itself. I am allowed to want it gone because I want to live and still wish with everything in me that I didn't have to lose it.

We keep talking after that, but the conversation changes. The panic has burned itself down enough that I can ask questions without every answer feeling like a threat. I ask about drains and sleeping, about showering and clothes, about how much he could move his arm and whether the numbness frightened him. I ask whether touching his chest felt strange afterwards, whether he ever woke up and forgot for a second, whether his body surprised him simply because his brain was still expecting something that wasn't there.

Some of his answers reassure me.

Some absolutely fucking don't.

Marcus doesn't seem particularly interested in making them reassuring. He makes them honest, and somewhere over the next hour the enormous black shape in my head labelled DOUBLE MASTECTOMY begins to break apart into things small enough to name.

None of those things sounds easy.

But they are things.

They are no longer one enormous shapeless terror waiting twelve days away. By the time I glance at the clock, it's 1:19 in the morning, and my eyes feel swollen almost shut. I yawn halfway through asking another question.

“You need to sleep,” Marcus says.

“You're awake too.”

“Because somebody texted me at midnight.”

“You advertised a two-a.m. service.”

“A serious professional error.”

“I'll mention it in my review.”

“Please don't.”

I smile into the dark and realise that, for the first time since I took my bra off, I am no longer looking at the mirror.

“Marcus?”

“Yes?”

“I think I'm going to be okay.”

He doesn't promise me I will be.

That's exactly why I believe him when he says, “I think so too.”

After we hang up, I stay where I am for a while with the phone resting against my chest, feeling the solid warmth of both breasts beneath it. Twelve days ago that sensation would have meant nothing, but tonight I notice every gram of it.

There are messages waiting for me when I finally check my phone.

Danny has sent one telling me he's thinking about me with no inspirational bullshit attached, followed three minutes later by an offer to Google a motivational quote if I require one, and make both of us deeply uncomfortable. Mum has sent four hearts and asked me to call her tomorrow.

Then I open Colin's message.

COLIN

Home.

I love you. xx