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 am eighty years old and I have a scar that runs from my breastbone to my pelvis.

I have shown it to four separate people, including the woman next door, who asked.

I can bend down to the bottom oven shelf. I did that on the second of March and I had to sit down on the kitchen floor afterward, and not because of the knee.

The study is still live. I am still in it. It is funded to 2034 exactly as he said.

Evanthia Kastellis has been out to that house twice now.

She is seventy-four. She drives herself, badly. She is not a warm woman and she does not try to be one, and I like her enormously.

She told me, the second time, something I did not ask about.

She told me that my husband wrote to that office eleven times between 2002 and 2013.

Every single year. Always in the fortnight after my appointment. Always the same four questions about the results.