Page 11 of While I’m Still Here

“It does if you put granola in it.”

“Do you have granola?” I retort, while I keep walking.

“No,” she sighs in defeat.

I reach the lift and jab the button. “Exactly.”

“Colin?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know what to do.”

And fuck. There she is. Not the woman making jokes and arguing with me about yoghurt.

Just Bea. My Bea.

My forehead drops against the cool metal beside the lift doors. “You don’t have to know.”

“They gave me a folder.”

“A folder?”

“Pink.”

“Of course.”

“Exactly! Thank you. Finally, someone understands why it’s offensive.”

I almost laugh. Key word being almost. “So, what’s in the super offensive pink folder?”

“My impending doom, mostly,” she says.

“Bea.”

“Treatment stuff.”

The lift finally arrives, and I step inside. “What treatment?”

“Surgery.”

My stomach drops. “When?”

“Soon. I have to get more tests first.”

“What surgery?”

She sighs. “Mastectomy.”

I close my eyes as the lift descends, and I can hear her breathing through the phone. “One, or both?”

“Maybe both.” Jesus Christ. “Then chemo, probably. Maybe radiotherapy. They’re checking to see if it’s spread. Lymph nodes are somehow involved. I don’t even know what they are. I stopped understanding anything after she told me they were going to cut my tits off.”

The lift doors open, but I don’t move. Someone waiting outside looks at me strangely, and I step out because I might be having a mental breakdown about Bea having cancer; they don’t know that. All they see is a 6’3 man standing in the lift and refusing to move. “Has it spread?”

“They don’t know yet.”

How does that somehow manage to be worse than almost every answer except one?