Chapter 1 — Months, Not Years

"The last treatment didn't respond the way we needed it to."

Dr. Voss said it looking directly at her, not at the file open on the desk between them.

That was something Celine had noticed about him over the past two years. He rarely consulted the file when she was in the room. Either he had it memorized, or he'd gotten accustomed to her report.

"What that means for your prognosis," Dr. Voss continued, "is that the picture has changed."

"How changed?" Celine asked him.

He laced his hands on the desk. "We're talking about months, Celine. Not years."

There it was.

She'd known, abstractly.

"How many months?" she asked him.

"I can't give you an exact number. It doesn't work that way — there are too many variables, and I'd rather be honest about what I don't know than give you a figure that turns out to be wrong in either direction." He paused. "What I can tell you is that if we're going to attempt another course of treatment, the time to decide is now. Not next month."

She nodded and watched him pull a folder from the side of the desk and open it, watched him begin to speak about options — the names of two clinical trials, a specialist in Edinburgh he thought might be worth a consultation including what a palliative care discussion might look like if she decided she was done trying.

He gave her each one in the same measured voice, the same eye contact and without a single apology.

He'd said it once, at her first appointment two years ago, and since then they'd both tacitly agreed to skip the part where he performed something for her benefit.

She listened. Then she said, "Can I go?"

Yes you can go. Don't forget to call if you have questions and visit the hospital okay. You already have the office number right?” Dr. Voss asked Celine.

“ Yes, I have the office number and I would certainly call,doctor.” She replied him and picked up her bag from the floor beside the chair, shook Dr. Voss hands and left the office.

She walked past the reception desk and through the waiting room and finally out through the glass doors into the open air.

She sat on the bench outside the building; took out her phone and typed two words to Rowan, her best friend: Come over.

Rowan's response came in thirty seconds. How bad?

Celine looked at the question, put the phone in her pocket, got up from the bench, and hailed a cab without answering it.

Rowan was already outside her apartment door when she arrived.

She'd come straight from the architecture firm — still in her work clothes, a blazer she'd had for four years with a pen mark on the left cuff she kept meaning to have removed. Her eyes were red like someone who had spent a cab ride crying by degrees, so there would be something left for later.

When Celine unlocked the door Rowan stepped forward and hugged her. Celine stood in it and let her.

"Okay," Celine said, after a moment.

"Not yet," Rowan said.

They stood in the doorway for another ten seconds.

Then they went inside.

They ended up on the kitchen floor, backs against the cabinets, legs stretched out toward the island.

Celine couldn't explain why they were sitting on the floor — it was the same impulse she'd had at sixteen when something bad happened, the floor feeling like the honest option, the couch too much like someone had staged it for the purpose of receiving bad news.

She told Rowan what Dr. Voss had said. Months. The clinical trials. The Edinburgh specialist. Rowan listened without interrupting, which took visible effort — her whole body was the effort of not interrupting.

When Celine finished, Rowan said, "Okay." A breath. "Okay."

"You can say something." Celine told her.

"I'm — I need a second."

"Take your second."

Rowan pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. She was not a person who cried prettily; her face went blotchy and her eyes swelled and she'd been this way since they were nineteen and Celine had known her through enough bad things to find it something close to comforting, the realness of it.

When Rowan cried, the crying meant something.

"What are you going to do," Rowan said. Not a question. More like a sentence she was testing the weight of.

"I don't know yet."

"Are you going to try the trials?"

"I don't know."

"Do you want to talk about it or do you want me to not make you talk about it."

Celine thought about it. "Both. Neither. Give me something to eat."

Rowan got up without another word and started opening cabinets. Celine stayed on the floor. She could hear Rowan pulling things out, the thud of a pot, the scraping sound of the drawer where Celine kept the pasta.

"You have seven different types of pasta and no sauce," Rowan called.

"There's a jar in the back."

"This expired in February."

"That's fine." Celine responded.

"Celine."

"Rowan."

The sound of the jar being opened resumed and presumably smelled. Then Rowan apparently decided to live dangerously because the pot went on the burner.

They ate on the kitchen floor. Celine had one glass of wine and Rowan had two.

At some point the conversation shifted from practical to something else.

“ I'm angry, I'm scared. I don't just understand what's happening.” Celine told Rowan and almost immediately Rowan replied her; “ Baby, I know you are scared and angry and trust me when I say these emotions are okay because anyone who receives that kind of information would be too.”

"The thing I keep thinking," Celine said, "is that I've been very responsible. My whole life. Very careful, very sensible — I did everything in the right order and I saved money and I have a good credit score and I have never once done anything that didn't make sense."

Rowan waited.

"And I'm twenty-four and I have almost nothing reckless to show for it."

"That," Rowan said, "is the most self-absorbed thing I have ever heard." A slight pause. "And also completely fair."

Celine laughed. It surprised her. Rowan laughed too and then stopped laughing too soon and pressed her face into her hand and cried again properly, her shoulders shaking, and Celine sat beside her and didn't try to stop her because there was nothing useful to say to it and sometimes the only correct response to a thing being terrible was to let it be terrible.

Afterward they sat quietly for a while.

Celine picked up her phone. She opened the notes app and started typing.

Things I keep saying I'll do later.

Rowan leaned over and looked at the screen.

Eat somewhere expensive. Not a special occasion. Just because.

Sing badly in public, intentionally.

Tell the person at the café that their coffee is terrible because it is.

Dance in the rain. She paused on this one. Slightly embarrassing but she left it.

Go to Iceland. Or anywhere, really. Somewhere cold.

Say the thing I always stop myself from saying.

Call Mum and don't spend the whole time being fine.

She typed for another minute. Rowan read over her shoulder without commenting, which was the correct thing to do.

Then Celine typed the last one.

She wasn't sure why she typed it. It came out the way some things come out — before the part of you that edits has had time to get there.

*Fall in love.*

She looked at it.

It sat there on the screen, small and unformatted, looking more serious than she'd meant it to. She waited to feel embarrassed enough to delete it. The embarrassment didn't quite arrive; so she put the phone face-down on the floor.

"Right," she said.

"Yeah," Rowan said.

Twenty minutes later Celine picked the phone back up and opened her browser. She typed a name she'd typed before, in different moods, for different reasons: Lucan Mercer.

She'd been following his career for three years, loosely.

She knew the company. She knew the projects. She'd read enough to have an informed opinion about his business philosophy, which was that he valued privacy in inverse proportion to how most public-facing businessmen did, and that he operated under the apparent belief that visibility and credibility were not related.

What she'd never established, in three years of occasional googling, was what he looked like.

There were photographs. Sort of. Two or three attached to articles, distant, poorly lit — a man at the edge of a building site, a figure in the background of an event photograph, something that might have been him getting into a car.

His company according to rumors had a media policy that forbade close photography on any premises it controlled.

The resulting image of some hidden photographs was a man-shaped gap in the public record.

She'd once found a profile piece that described him as "famously difficult to document" and had apparently given up trying, describing his features in three vague adjectives and moving on.

She scrolled through the search results now, looking for a piece she'd read months ago.

The page loaded. She scanned down.

And directly below the third result, in smaller text, formatted like a recent addition: Mercer Estate. Live-in Household Assistant. Competitive salary. Applications open.

She clicked it.

She read the listing. She read the salary.

She read the salary again.

"Rowan." Celine called out.

"What."

"Come here."

Rowan shuffled across the kitchen floor and looked at the screen. A silence.

"Celine—"

She was already tapping through to the application form.

"You have never done household management," Rowan said. "You can barely manage your own household, no offense—"

"I manage things constantly."

"That is not the same as what that job is and you know it."

"The salary covers six months of medical expenses." She was filling out the form as she said it. Name. Contact details. Work history. She was typing faster than she usually typed. "Including the Edinburgh consultation."

"That's not the only reason you're applying."

Celine finished the last field. She hit submit.

Her phone buzzed.

She looked at it. Rowan looked at it.

Application received. Interview scheduled for tomorrow, 9am at Mercer Estate. Please confirm attendance.

Celine confirmed.

A second buzz. Confirmation received. The address will be provided upon arrival confirmation. Please note our photography policy: no recording devices of any kind are permitted on the estate premises.

Rowan stared at her phone, then at Celine. "He doesn't even tell you where the estate is until you've confirmed you're coming?"

"Privacy," Celine said. "He's very particular about it."

"You've never seen his face."

"No."

"You're going to his house tomorrow."

"It's an interview."

"You're going to his house tomorrow," Rowan repeated, in the tone she used when she was not disagreeing with something so much as requiring it to be said out loud, placed in the record, acknowledged by all present.

Celine put her phone down on the floor between them. She looked at the ceiling.

"Well," she said. "I've been very responsible my whole life."

Rowan made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite not one. "Full report. Tomorrow. Everything."

"Everything," Celine said.