When I first started chemo, Al or Becky came with me and sat and waited while the nurses dripped the magic poison into my veins. But with the girls to be picked up from school and housework and cooking to be done, it soon seemed stupid to have another adult taking several hours off work to be there. It was more useful to have Becky do our groceries than come to my medical appointments. By my third cycle, Al was dropping me off at the hospital’s front door and I was taking a cab home. For my three-month checkup, I took the subway for the first time in almost a year. I was rather proud of that, another milestone, like Frank’s party. There was a huge Christmas tree in the hospital’s atrium, sparkling with oversized silver balls; the doctor said, “That all looks fine,” and I stopped on the way home to pick up a gift I wanted for the girls. It was a good day.

Al hurried into the front hall as soon as I came through the door.

“Where were you? I thought you’d be home by now.”

“I stopped to do some shopping.”

“So?”

“So far, so good.”

“All good?”

“Yup, all good. That’s what she said.”

He folded me into his arms, hugging me tight, but after a moment I pulled back to look at his face. He was smiling. He looked relieved and happy. What else did I expect? It’s not that I thought he wanted me dead or anything; on the contrary, he may have wanted me to get better really fast. Once or twice in the first months after he came home, the phone rang and someone hung up when I answered. Maybe it was just a wrong number. I mean, if she was calling, surely she’d just call his cell. But I got a horrible little reminder of what it felt like when he first told me of her existence, the twisting doubt at every turn, the gut-wrenching assumption about every unexplained gap in his schedule; the ugly temptation to pick his phone up off the kitchen counter and read an incoming text. We had agreed to set this stuff aside, concentrate on my getting better. Of course, I asked him about her. Once, he said, “She understands,” which wasn’t very encouraging, and another time he said, “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to worry about it,” which sounded better, but mainly I had been too sick and tired to pursue it any further. It’s been a year since he came home, but I can’t help wondering if she’s still waiting for him. If I get better, will he leave?

“We should go out to celebrate tomorrow night, get a babysitter,” he said.

“We’ll never get one at this time of year. And I’m busy tomorrow; remember, I asked Frank for a drink. I want to strategize about the serial.”

At that Al just raised an eyebrow.

“A good Christmas. That will be our celebration,” I promised.

—

Despite the approaching holidays, there was a whiff of fear in the newsroom when I dropped by to meet Frank the following day: it took me a second to recognize it, but it was a familiar odour. The chemo clinic smelled of it too. There, everybody was slow and shuffling, almost languid in their pace but terrified nonetheless. The Telegram, on the other hand, seemed to survive in an atmosphere of barely controlled panic; the place was full of scurrying bodies and bent heads, all the editors and reporters engaged in a desperate busyness that suggested they were bailing the Titanic rather than simply putting out tomorrow’s paper. In the brew pub across the street, where Frank and some of his cohort often go for a beer, the gossips reported that subscriptions were in free fall; advertising was down and traffic to the website where readers scarf up the content for free was not beginning to make up the difference. Stanek, like some tyrant who can’t believe that nature won’t bend to his will and so blames his underlings for famine and floods, had just fired a perfectly respectable editor and replaced him with some roving social media executive who promised to turn everything around. One of Frank’s witty buddies said the guy was just working in newspapers the way hipsters affect porkpie hats. It’s retro and fun and hey, the next big thing should be on its way soon.

They continued in this bitter vein for some time and it took me a while to get Frank on his own.

“You know about this Dickens serial idea?”

“Emm.”

“If the publisher is so keen on new media, why am I being commissioned to revive a nineteenth-century form? Nobody publishes fiction in newspapers any more. Do you think people will read it?”

“I’m not sure people read newspapers period, so why not give it a try?” he asked. “Stanek is an eccentric; marking the Dickens bicentenary is a pet project of his. And the serial is counter-intuitive; he likes that aspect. On the one hand, you’ve got one-hundred-and-forty-character blasts appearing on your phone every second; on the other, wait a week to run out to the good old newsstand and buy the next gripping two-thousand-word instalment.”

“I’m not sure it’ll work,” I said.

“Then why did you agree?”

“I don’t have anything else on the go, and I like the idea of something so contained and written to such a tight deadline. I can be pretty sure I’ll live to see it through.”

Frank swallowed and said nothing. People don’t want to hear that you might not get better; they tell you there are all sorts of fabulous treatments these days, as though maybe you didn’t know that already. I have an aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, triple-negative because it lacks all three of the common receptors they target with those nifty new drug treatments. The doctors never say much about the prognosis and on that night I was just trying to hold on to the previous day’s optimism. I quickly filled the awkward pause.

“You guys are offering me pretty good money. And it’s a flat fee. You pay me whether the readers buy it or not.”

“Yes. But you’ll care how it does…”

“That’s true. I was really hoping you would edit it, but some assistant called me and set up a meeting with the weekend editor. We are supposed to have lunch after the holidays. What’s he like?”

“Jonathan Torres? Decent-enough guy once you get to know him. You’ll figure him out. You’re going to love the challenge. Publishing fiction weekly, just like Dickens used to. I bet you’ve already got something mapped out.”

I just smiled; it had been only two weeks since Frank’s party but by this point I was already deep into research on the Staplehurst railway crash. “I should get home to the girls. Guess you’ll see me in print.”

—

In my book, “decent-enough guy once you get to know him” is code for unprepossessing and not too bright but harmless. On meeting Jonathan Torres two days into the new year, I was not at all sure, however, that the man was harmless. He is tall and fit looking with curly black hair and would be good looking were it not for rather thick glasses that seem to displace his gaze by a few inches so that it is almost impossible to make natural eye contact with him. From the start he took a hearty tone with me that was audibly false. He came across as simultaneously awkward and smarmy. How appropriate, I thought, he’s a Uriah Heep. You could almost imagine him rubbing his hands together.

Once we had shrugged off our heavy winter coats and settled ourselves in the cheerful French restaurant that offers about the best food you can get within walking distance of The Telegram, he read the menu quickly, picked out a steak, let me order a salad, and made a sound in his throat to indicate business will now begin.

“Fabulous project the publisher’s got you working on,” he said. “Great idea. Love it. Do you know what you are going to write? I mean, I know you know what you are going to write. You’re a novelist, an awesome writer. Love your stuff. I haven’t read that much but what I have…I mean, the publisher loves your stuff and you’ve done this before obviously. Not quite in this form but I am sure you have ideas; I just mean…Well, do you have the plot worked out? We don’t want you to get going and then not know…Well, I guess novelists always know what their ending is…”

I listened as he tied himself in knots. He seemed to feel I was important enough that I had to be flattered but probably not good enough to actually do the job. I wondered if his world was full of people who were more powerful than talented. Or perhaps power was the only coin he recognized.

“Yes. I have an idea, and a plot.”

“Great.” He sounded very relieved. “Can I ask what it is?”

“I thought since we are reviving a nineteenth-century form that I would set the story in the nineteenth century.”

“Love it. A Victorian story. Sounds good.”

The food arrived and we ate for a bit before he seemed to realize he had not got what he wanted.

“So, you say a Victorian story.”

“No, you said that actually.”

“But you did say that it would be set in the nineteenth century? You just said that.”

“Yes. Nineteenth-century England, so that’s Victorian. And France too. There will be a few scenes in France.”

“Great. So, France and England in the nineteenth century. So, um, what’s going to happen?”

I took pity on him finally.

“Well, it’s the Dickens bicentenary; the story will be one from Dickens’ own life.”

“From his life?”

“Yes.”

“You mean the story of his life, an autobiography.”

“No, not really a biography,” I said, trying to hide any note of condescension as I corrected him. “Just an episode from his life. An episode in which he played a role, but he’s not the protagonist.”

“So Dickens appears as a character, but he is not the main character?”

“That’s right. It will be about people around him.”

“Good. Sounds great. Love it. Can you tell me a bit more?”

“Why don’t you wait until you read it.”

“Emmm…Okay. I know Bob settled the fee with your agent. He told me you’d agreed to a minimum of fifteen instalments.”

“Yes, at least. I think it may take me more like twenty. I tend to underestimate how long anything is going to be, but once we get started, I can give you a final count.”

“You’ll need to start soon, won’t you?” He sounded alarmed. “We were hoping to begin publishing before the end of the month. I mean, it’s 2012 now.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. I’ve already written two instalments. I am just beginning a third.”