What saved me was not more sacrifice.

It was less.

It was one furious sister on the edge of a motel bed telling me that considering everyone but myself was not a virtue but the very thing that had been killing me long before the cancer ever showed up on a scan.

Chapter 6 — Marva

My sister Marva was the only person who knew all of it — the cancer, the months, the concealment — and she had been fighting me about the concealment since December, and when I called her from a taxi outside the hospital and told her I’d left, she was quiet for a moment and then she said, “Oh, Etta.

Finally.” Not I’m sorry. Finally.