Everyone is hoping for a girl this time.

Everyone but her. Secretly, she worries about passing the cancer gene to a new generation.

Men get breast cancer, too, one of her blogger friends pointed out when she wrote about that concern.

True. But it’s not nearly as common.

She can’t help but worry about the health of her daughter and future granddaughters. She’s been warning Rebecca that she needs to do self-exams and start her yearly mammogram screening in another couple of years.

Beck, of course, waves her mother off. She’s too young and full of life to worry about illness.

So was I at her age. I never thought something like this could happen. No family history . . .

You just never know.

It’s been over a year now since Beck married Keith. They’ll probably be starting a family, too, soon.

Meredith has so much to live for. If only . . .

Shaking her head, she turns off the light and leaves the kitchen, never noticing the cut screen on the window facing the newly planted garden out back, or the shadow of a human figure lurking in the far corner.

Tragic News

This is Meredith’s daughter, Rebecca, writing. I don’t know how to say this. There’s no easy way. I’m still in shock. But you all meant a lot to my mom, and she would want our family to let you all know that she passed away this weekend.

—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog, Pink Stinks

Chapter 2

The news reaches Landry Wells on the sort of picture-perfect summer morning when it feels as though nothing can possibly go wrong.

It’s warm—southern Alabama in June is always warm—but not yet too steamy for sipping hot coffee on the second-story porch swing. A gentle breeze stirs Spanish moss draped in the live oaks framing her view of Mobile Bay, and the world is hushed but for chirping birds and the staccato spritzing of the lawn sprinklers below.

Still unshowered, wearing the shorts and T-shirt she threw on to walk the dog after rolling out of bed, Landry sits with her bare feet propped on the rail, laptop open to the Web page that bears the shocking news.

News that struck out of nowhere on what promised to be another precious, precious ordinary day.

Years ago—after a routine mammogram gave way to the sonogram that led to the biopsy that resulted in a cancer diagnosis—she couldn’t imagine ever living another ordinary day. But the women to whom she turned for support—an online group of breast cancer patients and survivors she now counts among her closest friends—assured her that normality would return, sooner or later. They were right.

Every night, when she climbs into bed, she thanks God for the gift of a day in which she carted her teenagers around and did loads of laundry and sat sipping coffee with her husband; a day filled with reading and writing, weeding the garden, feeding a family, watching good television and decadently bad television, grumbling about crumbs and clutter and mosquito bites but never really minding any of it.

She watches a monarch butterfly alight on a pink rose blossom in her sunlit flower bed below and thinks of Meredith.

She had been doing so well. Yes, Meredith had reported a recurrence well over a year ago. Her oncologist found some suspicious cells in her breast, and after a radical mastectomy and radiation, pronounced her clear again.

That’s what she wrote, anyway, in one of her typically cheerful blog entries.

Was it a lie? Was she shielding them all from the grim fact that her cancer had spread; that she was dying? Was she trying to avoid the familiar shift in interaction they had all witnessed on other cancer blogs?

Landry considers the inevitable scenario that commences whenever a fellow blogger reports, in a post laced with incredulity, bravado, false cheer—or all of the above—that her doctors have run out of treatment options.

There’s always a prompt outpouring of support, prayers, hollow optimism, and talk of miracles. Eventually—too often overnight—the blogger’s posts will begin to detail alarming symptoms, hospital visits, hospice arrangements. Attempts at breezy humor fall flat; entries become increasingly graphic and sporadic, infused with sadness, weariness, fear.

Then come the final posts written by someone else—a daughter, a husband, a friend—sometimes chronicling the blogger’s final days or hours, often reporting that the patient wants her Internet friends to know she’s thinking of them; that their comments are being shared with her in her lucid moments. Once in a while the blogger’s own last entry—sometimes intended as a farewell, but often not—is followed by just one other: a loved one’s terse report of the death and funeral arrangements.

With Meredith, there’s been none of that. Her daughter’s post had struck out of the blue.

Bewildered, Landry scrolls up to the previous blog entry. Bearing Saturday’s date, it was written by Meredith herself.

Having read it when it first appeared, Landry is already familiar with the buoyant account of Meredith’s weekend morning spent planting a vegetable garden in her Ohio backyard.

Her husband was still away, she wrote, so she had to dig and lug heavy bags of fertilizer herself. But it would all be worthwhile, she said in closing, a few months from now when she got to enjoy my favorite treat in the whole wild world: home-grown tomatoes, heavy with sugar and juice, eaten straight off the vine, sprinkled with salt and still warm from the sun.

The woman who wrote those words seemed to be looking ahead to August without reservation. Was she deluding herself, or trying to fool everyone else, writing about arduous physical labor when she was in fact confined to a hospital bed in the final stages of her disease?

This is crazy. It can’t be real.

Maybe it’s some kind of practical joke, or . . .

Maybe Meredith’s blogger account was hacked, or . . .

Maybe it’s real and she just didn’t want us to know.

Feeling vaguely betrayed, Landry opens a search window, types in the name Meredith, and stops to think for a moment.

She knows her friend’s last name is Haywood—or is it Heywood? Heyworth? Something like that. And she lives in a Cincinnati suburb . . . but which one?

Funny how you can know someone intimately without having that basic information; without ever having come face-to-face in the real world.

She types Haywood into the Google box and presses Enter.

There are a number of hits for Meredith Haywood— none that fit.

But when she replaces Haywood with Heywood, she finds herself looking at a death notice from the Cincinnati Enquirer, accompanied by a familiar photo: the head shot Meredith uses on her blog.

It’s real.

A lump rises in Landry’s throat, but she pushes it back and reads on, dry-eyed.

There was a time when she cried over Hallmark Christmas commercials. She wrote about that on her blog last December. Turned out that a surprising number of her followers did the same sappy thing.

These days it takes a hell of a lot more than a sentimental advertisement to bring tears to her eyes. She got used to holding them back in the wake of her diagnosis, not wanting to frighten her children, or depress her husband, or feel sorry for herself. Perhaps, most of all, she was afraid that if she allowed herself to start crying, she’d never stop.

But this is no Hallmark ad. It’s a death notice—albeit a brief one, not a full-blown obituary. Details are sparse, funeral arrangements incomplete.

Shaken, Landry closes the laptop and stands. Resting her elbows on the wooden railing, chin cupped heavily in her hands, she gazes out over the water.

Just beyond the boardwalk, in the shallows close to shore, a pair of kayakers glide in parallel symmetry. Farther out: the usual array of fishing boats, plus a cluster of sailors taking advantage of the morning breeze. Not a cloud in the sky; the forecast calls for a beautiful day.