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.

I knew what that envelope was for. He told me what it was for when he handed it to me.

I did not want the day that envelope was written for to be today.

Not in 2019, not in 2021, not in 2023, and not in the August of this year standing in front of an oven.

So I made absolutely certain that it never was.

Dr. Opoku has been extremely good about this and she has said the thing a doctor says, which is that we cannot know what any particular scan would have shown.

That is true and I have written it down because she asked me to.

But a study that had imaged my abdomen every single year since 2002 would have been imaging it in the February of 2019. And again in 2020. And in 2021, and 2022, and 2023.

And in 2019, on the best estimate anybody has given me, that thing was about five centimetres.