Can you stay up an hour later tomorrow so I can finish my presentation? Question after question after question, month after month.

And not once — not one single time in six months — had I walked through that door, and looked my mother in the eyes, and asked her the only question that mattered. Mom.

Are you okay? David had kept her secret for a few weeks.

I had made it impossible for her to tell me hers for six months, by never once being a person she could tell.

Chapter 9 — Cancer