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other very much for years. She was a practical woman and nothing ever seemed to fluster her.
    ‘You need to get a second opinion,’ she said right away. ‘Tell Dr Hunter you want a second opinion.’
    ‘I don’t think there’s much doubt,’ Lynn said. ‘This is not just Dr Hunter–it’s the specialist too. What’s happening is what we’ve feared all along.’
    ‘You absolutely must have a second opinion. Doctors get things wrong. They are not infallible.’
    Lynn, with some reluctance, promised her mother she would ask for a second opinion. Then, after she had finished and was driving back home, she churned it over in her mind. How many more second opinions could she get? During these past years she had tried everything. She’d scoured the Internet, looking at each of the big US teaching hospitals. The German hospitals. The Swiss ones. She’d tried all the alternative options she could find. Healers of every kind–faith, vibration, distant, hands-on. Priests. Boluses of coloidal silver. Homeopaths. Herbalists. Acupuncturists.
    Sure, maybe hermother had a point. Maybe the diagnosis could be wrong. Perhaps another specialist might know something Dr Granger did not and could recommend something less drastic. Perhaps there was some new medication that could treat this. But how long did you keep looking while your daughter continued to go downhill? How long before you had to accept that surgery was perhaps, in this case, the only option?
    As she turned right at the mini-roundabout off the London Road, into Carden Avenue, the car heeled over, making a horrible scraping sound. She changed gear and heard the usual metallic knocking underneath her from the exhaust pipe, which had a broken bracket. Caitlin said it was the Grim Reaper knocking, because the car was dying.
    Her daughter had a macabre sense of humour.
    She drove on up the hill into Patcham, her eyes watering as the immensity of the situation started to overwhelm her. Oh shit . She shook her head in bewilderment. Nothing, nothing, nothing had prepared her for this. How the hell did you tell your daughter that she was going to have to have a new liver? And probably one taken from a dead body?
    She turned up the hill into their street, then made a left into her driveway, pulled on the handbrake and switched off the engine. As usual it juddered on for some moments, spluttering and shaking the car, and banging the exhaust pipe beneath her again, before falling silent.
    The house was a semi in a quiet residential avenue and, like many homes in this city, on a steep hill. It had views, across trees that masked the London Road and the railway line, of some of the swanky, dreamy houses and massive gardens of Withdean Road on the far side of the valley. All the houses in her avenue were of the same basic design: three-bedroomed, 1930s, with a rounded, metalled Art Deco influence which she had always liked. They had small front gardens with a short driveway in front of the attached garage and good-sized plots at the rear.
    The previous ownershad been an elderly couple and when Lynn moved in she’d had all kinds of plans to transform it. But after seven years here, she had not even been able to afford to rip out the manky old carpets and replace them, let alone carry out her grander schemes of knocking through walls and re-landscaping the garden. Fresh paint and some new wallpaper were all she had managed so far. The dreary kitchen still had a fusty old-people smell to it, despite all her efforts with pot pourri and plug-in air fresheners.
    One day , she used to promise herself. One day .
    The same one day that she promised herself she would build a little studio in the garden. She loved to paint scenes of Brighton in watercolours and had had some modest success in selling them.
    She unlocked the front door and went inside, into the narrow hallway. She peered up the stairs, wondering if Caitlin was out of bed yet, but could hear no sound.
    Heavy-hearted, she climbed