Chapter 21: Borrowed Time

The oncologist used the phrase 'exceeding expectations' in January of the fourth year. Mara received this with the equanimity she had worked hard to maintain across all directions of information. Good news and bad news had the same quality now: information, requiring response, to be received without the investment of too much hope or too much fear. But she allowed herself, privately, on the drive home, a few minutes of something that was not equanimity. She was still here. She had been given time she hadn't expected. The qualification applied. But the months were real and she was in them. She told Theo and Justin at dinner. Theo was very still for a moment, and then he stood up and came around the table and hugged her in the specific way of someone releasing something they had been holding carefully. Justin stayed in his chair and looked at her across the table with the expression she had come to know as his most real one. 'What do you want to do with it?' he asked. 'Keep building,' she said. 'The school project first. Then whatever comes.' 'And personally?' She thought about it. 'Stay here,' she said. 'Keep the garden going. Work on the problems that interest me.' She looked at him. 'Be honest about the things that matter.' He nodded slowly. 'I want to ask you something,' he said. 'Okay.' 'Not a question you have to answer with a plan or a promise or anything you can't give. Just— an honest answer about right now.' 'Ask,' she said. 'Do you want this?' he said. 'What we have. As it is. Do you want it?' She looked at the kitchen and the light and the garden and her brother and the man across the table who had rebuilt the house with his hands and stayed. 'Yes,' she said. 'Completely.' 'Good,' he said simply. 'Then we have it.'