Page 105 of While I’m Still Here

For a moment, I forget to breathe. I don't think she understands what she's said or what it does to me. “All those photographs online are scars first,” she continues quietly. “You don't know anything about the person. You don't know what they sound like or whether they're funny or irritating or drink offensively expensive coffee. You just see what cancer did to them.” Her eyes lift to mine briefly before returning to my chest. “But this is just your chest. You're still Marcus.”

“Unfortunately.”

Her mouth curves. “Still annoyingly tall.”

“Yes.”

“Still own an offensively expensive watch.”

“My watch isn't offensive.”

“It absolutely is.”

The humour softens something between us, but it doesn't remove the intimacy. Bea's attention returns to the scar, and when she speaks again, her voice is quieter. “Can I touch it?”

Something inside me shifts. “Yes.”

She raises her hand slowly enough to give me every opportunity to change my mind. Her fingertips meet the scar with such care that I feel the pressure before I feel much sensation, tracing lightly across an area that has remained mostly numb since surgery.

“There?”

“Mostly numb.”

Her fingers move a little higher. “Here?”

“I can feel that.”

She stops instantly, eyes jumping to mine. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“You'd tell me?”

“Yes.”

Only then does she continue. Her fingertips explore the difference between numbness and sensation with a gentleness that makes this feel entirely unlike being examined. Eventually her palm settles over the flat side of my chest, warm against skin that spent a long time feeling foreign even to me.

Bea exhales. “It's warm.”

I look down at her hand. “What did you expect?”

“I don't know.” She sounds almost embarrassed by the admission. “Pictures make scars look cold.”

I understand what she means. Photographs freeze everything. They show the line left by surgery without the body around it. They can't show warmth beneath a palm, or a chest rising with breath, or the ordinary fact of a person continuing to exist around what happened to them.

Without thinking much about it, I place my hand over hers, and her eyes lift to mine. “Whatever you see the first time you look after surgery, remember that you're looking at something new,” I tell her. “There may be swelling and bruising. Dressings. It might frighten you because it won't look like the body you went into hospital with, and you might hate it.”

Her mouth trembles. A tear slips down her cheek before she can catch it, and I wipe it away with my thumb. “You don't have to love it, Bea. You don't even have to like it.”

Her eyes close briefly against my hand. “What if I don't recognise myself?”

I want to tell her she will. The certainty rises instinctively, because I want to give her something solid enough to hold on to, but I stop myself. I've spent enough time asking her to trust me to know better than to reassure her with promises I can't keep. “I can't tell you what you'll see,” I say instead. “But I can tell you that I recognise myself.”

Her eyes open. “Completely?”

“Completely.”

She looks down at my chest again, her palm still beneath mine. “You really do?”