The word still stops my breath a little every time I let myself think it. Remission. She was going to live.

She was going to grow old.

I came out onto the terrace with two cups of herbal tea and set one down beside her, and she reached up and took my hand, and her grip was strong now — warm and strong, nothing like the paper-light thing I had gathered off a backyard floor half a year before.

“How was your call with Arthur Vance?” she asked.

“Finished,” I said, sitting down beside her.