It was the gesture of a woman doing the absolute minimum a daughter can do — acknowledging, in passing, that her mother was uncomfortable, and then immediately delegating the discomfort to a drugstore product so that I would not have to think about it anymore.

A heat patch, for the aching back of a woman whose body was, at that very moment, being consumed from the inside by a disease neither of us would name for weeks.

I bought her a heat patch.

God forgive me, I bought her a heat patch, and went back to work.

Chapter 5 — She Looked Pregnant

A few weeks later, I could no longer avoid seeing that something was seriously wrong, though I found, to my lasting shame, that I was extraordinarily creative at avoiding it anyway.

Her face had gone thin, almost gaunt.