At eighty my stomach grew so large my family got frightened. The scan found something — and then a twelve-year-old record with my late husband’s name on it, and a folder called PROJECT AGNES.

They will write to you every year. The letter comes in February. It looks like nothing. Don’t put it in the bin.

Go to the appointment, Aggie. Every year. That’s the whole of what I’m asking.

R.

My sister Noemi died in the February of 2001.

She was fifty-eight years old.

It was ovarian, and by the time anybody knew anything about it there was not a great deal that could be done for her, and it took eleven weeks from the first scan to the funeral.

I was fifty-five.

I did not cope with it well and I am not going to write about 2001 on this page. Rutger was the one who got me through it and he never once mentioned that afterward.

And then in March of 2002 — thirteen months after we buried my sister — my husband came in from work on an ordinary Tuesday and told me that his firm had put an annual health check into the benefits package.