Tess came around the counter toward her. “I know it sounds very clinical and not very encouraging but—”

“No, it really doesn’t.”

“—I looked it up.” Tess smiled, hesitantly at first, then laid her arm around Iris’s shoulders in a robust kind of way. “It’s just common medicalese, pet. An abnormal area of density. It shows up as shadows or white spots on the mammogram.” She’d brought her PC with her and now had it opened on the counter.

“Shadows or white spots?”

“Apparently. Fatty breast tissue can look similar to a lump.”

“Fatty!”

“Iris, seriously, that’s it. An architectural distortion—”

“Can we stop calling it that!” Iris opened the cupboard and took out aspirin.

“Did you drink the whole bottle?”

Iris didn’t replied. She had drunk more than she’d meant to. Her back was to Tess for a few moments. “Look, I got this.” She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and showed Tess the letter from the Breast Clinic. “It came today.”

Tess took the letter. “They don’t waste any time.” She read it. “That’s good, Iris.”

“Yeah?”

Tess nodded. “Really. The sooner, the better. Right? Doesn’t mean bad news. Just … let’s get on top of this.” She paused a moment before continuing, “So … Iris … the distortion … it says here … just requires a bit of further exploration by ultrasound. It’s not unusual”—Tess lowered her voice and narrowed her wide eyes—“in older women.”

Iris suddenly burst out laughing, startling her friend. “Oh, thank you! Now I’m fat and old. I wish Luke could hear this.”

She brought the teapot and cups to the table and Tess read more: “An architectural distortion is an abnormal arrangement of tissue strands of the breast, often a radial or random pattern.” Tess looked up. “But … without any associated mass as the apparent cause.” She continued reading as Iris poured the tea. “There is no visible mass.” Tess read silently for a few moments.

“And?”

Tess held up her hand. “Here. Listen. The number of women in which the architectural distortion would actually represent invasive breast cancer is very low, perhaps five to seven percent. Clearly, most architectural distortions found on mammography are due to benign causes. There!” Tess sat back. “See?”

For a few moments both women sipped their tea, feeling somewhat relieved that perhaps the “distortion” was a thing of nothing, just as the doctor had said. Iris then showed Tess the sketch she was working on.

“Not bad, pet. Not bad at all. You’re a constant surprise, Iris. Really. I’m in awe of you.”

“Yeah?”

“Really. No, it’s good.” Tess reached across the table and squeezed Iris’s hand. “You know, I’m really proud of you. What with the uncertainty of your job at the paper and now this. You’re handling it so well.”

Iris got up and faced her friend and, as if rising to the occasion that all would be just fine, she stretched the back of her neck straight up and stood firm. “Anyway, it’s not like I have cancer. Sure it’s not? I’m just going back for a second mammogram and ultrasound. To be sure. End of story … maybe a biopsy.”

“Absolutely.” Tess knit her brows.

“But I can tell you for nothing, I am a little nervous.” She relaxed her stretch and started to clear the table.

“Don’t be. Let me be nervous for you.”

Iris nodded, feeling the genuine warmth from her friend.

“And I promised Luke I’d look after you. And a promise is a promise is a promise,” Tess said.

Suddenly, Iris was looking at Tess as if she’d just seen a ghost walk past, as if it wasn’t Tess who was speaking.

“Iris? What is it?”

Iris turned away. “Nothing.” She went to the sink and put the teacups in and washed them. Until that moment Iris had kept the words “promise” and “Luke” well apart from each other. Ever since that horrible afternoon toward the end when Luke had asked her to promise, she’d closeted that word, locking it away in the farthest cupboard of her mind. There had been too much to do just to get on with living. Anytime she’d revisited the moment when he’d reached across and grasped her arm and said he didn’t want Rose to be alone, she thought, She isn’t alone. I’m here! But now, hearing the word “promise” and thinking of her appointment, she felt suddenly cold, like an iceberg had melted and pulled her down in its freezing chill. Had Luke glimpsed some dark future? Had he known something?

A year had come and gone. And another. He who was living is now dead, the poet wrote. With each passing month she’d let herself forget what he’d asked and began to believe he’d only “wished” it to himself, and she’d merely overheard it. In the weeks and months after his death she hadn’t thought of anything but getting through. She’d had to take care of things, figure out things, learn how to do the dozens of things Luke had always done. And she did do everything she was expected to do. Tidied up his papers. Wrote thank-you notes. Sent memorial cards with his picture. Settled with the solicitor and executor. Squared away the insurance for Rose and got her through and off to London.

And now, what if?

What if you were in that most delicate and tender part of your life as a gifted young musician just lifting your bow to add to the beauty of the world and suddenly not only was your father dead but your mother, too? What music would be left to you then? Luke and Iris were “only” children. Iris’s parents had died within a few years of each other when she was thirty. Luke’s parents, too, were both dead. His mother had a stroke and died shortly after and his father lived out the rest of his life in a nursing home in Monkstown, overlooking the sea. Luke had visited him as often as he could, even after his father no longer recognized him.

Rose was too young, too talented, too vulnerable to be parentless.

She had no one else.

“Are you all right? Pet?”

Iris determined right then and there, in the middle of the kitchen with her head pounding, her left breast with a phantomlike pain, her blue Wellies tossed on the floor in the sitting room, the poppies with their still-turgid stems, that she was going to make the promised phone call. She believed this was the right thing and only thing to do, she believed this more than anything. That yes, she must find out if Hilary, her daughter’s birth mother, was somewhere out there.

All this and more Iris thought about as she stood frozen by the sink with Tess watching her. It had been many years ago, in the summer of ’90, but Iris remembered: It’d been raining the day they met her at the Adoption Board offices. Steady gray rain falling all over Dublin. Streets gleaming. Hilary had kept her khaki raincoat on over a print skirt and white T-shirt. Her legs were bare and her loafers wet from walking. She was twenty-one or twenty-two. Iris remembers feeling sorry for her yet strangely elated that Hilary was choosing them. (That’s how it happened in those days.) Hilary had her pick of five couples. She didn’t say very much. She didn’t mention the birth father, or why she’d decided to place her baby up for adoption in Dublin. All they knew was she was an American student doing her master’s degree in Irish literature and the baby she’d given birth to just a few weeks earlier was already in the care of a foster mother. She was tall, Iris remembered. Tall and thin with dark shoulder-length hair that had a bit of curl to it. But that’s all she could remember. The encounter had been too brief to remember anything else. As their meeting was coming to a close, Luke asked, “Is there anything you’d like us to do?”

“Just one thing,” she’d said. Iris looked at her. What color were her eyes? They were light. Were they blue or gray?

“Yes?” Luke said, reaching for Iris’s hand.

“Her name—”

Luke and Iris looked to each other. They’d already picked out a name.