The results come on Thursday, four days instead of five, which he notes with the particular bitter humour of a man for whom efficiency has stopped being a virtue.

He reads them alone, standing in the kitchen doorway of the room he still, formally, rents from a dead man, the tablet’s light too bright in the grey morning.

The word is one he expected in shape if not in specifics. Not the sharpest version of the news, not the gentlest either — a mass, the physician’s careful language calls it, in a location that explains the months of vague signal escalating to something specific, operable in principle, though the operability comes with numbers attached, percentages that mean less to him than the plain fact underneath them: this is not nothing, and it was not, four months ago when he first noticed it, entirely untreatable either.

He sits with that second fact the longest.

Four months ago, if he’d walked in the first week the ache announced itself, this would have been a different conversation, weighted differently, the percentages kinder. He spent those four months telling himself not yet, the same phrase that cost him nine years of silence, applied this time not to a moral failure but to his own body, and the outcome is the same shape it’s always been: a door that stays open only briefly, and closes a little further every time you decline to walk through it.

He does not fall apart. He has never been someone who falls apart in the moment a thing happens — the falling apart, when it comes for him, tends to arrive later, sideways, disguised as something smaller.

He goes to the garden instead, because the garden is where he has always taken things he doesn’t yet know how to hold, and works the beet bed with more care than the beets currently require, and lets his hands do the deciding his mind isn’t ready to do.

He thinks about Mara, about the sentence he’ll need to build for her, about how much of the truth a person can carry before the carrying itself becomes its own injury.

He thinks about Lena again, longer this time, and does not stop himself.

He does not go to Meridian Street. He does not send word. He simply works, through the whole grey morning, until the sun finds its way properly into the yard and the day insists, the way days do, on continuing regardless of what he now knows and has not yet said.