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.

He never asked Kastellis, because he did not want to know.

So my son carried that on his own. For twelve years.

Every Sunday afternoon in my front room, with a cup of tea, talking about the garden.

And then he had to sit in a hospital corridor at fifty-six years of age and find out that the folder he put back in 2014 was eleven years of a man quietly trying to keep his wife alive.
PART 5

They took it out on the twenty-ninth of January.

Four hours in theatre. Nine days on a ward.

I had a tube in me for four of those days that I am not going to describe to anybody, and a nurse called Bettina who got me out of that bed on day two when I did not want to go.

The pathology came back clear on the eleventh of February.

Dr. Opoku rang that house herself to tell me, at about six in the evening, which she did not have to do and which somebody in an office would normally have done four days later in a letter.