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hunk, though.”
    “Really? Parvee was practically hyperventilating.”
    “Oh, he’s certainly attractive. Kind of tall and model-y looking. Blondish brown hair and tan skin and green eyes. Or maybe they’re blue.” Green. Definitely green.
    Elizabeth snorted and rolled her eyes. “Oh, one of those tall, model-y types.”
    “You know what I mean. Almost too pretty? And sort of exotic. Not my type.” She shrugged, dismissively. It was true, at least officially. Her official type had always been WASPy and solid and corporate, even in high school, even in junior high. Men like Kyle, whose handsomeness was foursquare and daily. Unofficially, secretly, her tastes leaned toward the gorgeous and glowing. Her secret men had always been formidably beautiful, another quality that marked them as happily separate from her real, day-lit life.
    Piper felt unsettled by the idea that Cornelia’s husband had triggered the memory of the ophthalmologist’s back. But the ophthalmologist and all the others were from a very long time ago. It wasn’t as though she wanted them now. It wasn’t as though she were jealous of anything Cornelia had.
    “Is his wife beautiful, too?” asked Elizabeth.
    “Oh, she’s got a pretty face, I guess,” said Piper, her tone under-cutting the assessment. “But she’s the size of an eight-year-old and built like one, too, and her eyes are too big for her face, and her head’s too big for her body.”
    “A Powerpuff Girl!” crowed Elizabeth.
    “Exactly,” said Piper. She loved it when Elizabeth talked smack about people. They looked at each other and burst into giggles.
    When their laughter dwindled and Piper was wiping her eyes, she found Elizabeth smiling at her, some of that wistful sweetness from earlier creeping back into her gaze.
    “I love you, Pipe.” Elizabeth almost whispered it. Piper held her breath. She and Elizabeth did not say “I love you” to each other.
    “The cancer’s spreading.” Elizabeth said the words as though they were any words. Almost before she had finished saying them, Piper was shaking her head, firmly.
    Piper stopped shaking her head, let her breath out, and said coolly, “The cancer is not spreading.”
    “Piper.”
    “Did Dr. Firestone tell you that? The man is seventy if he’s a day. They took out your ovaries, Elizabeth, and your uterus. Remember?” Elizabeth flinched, but Piper wasn’t about to stop talking.
    “There’s nowhere for the cancer to spread from or to. You’ve been on chemo for months.” Piper felt her voice getting louder and harder. “The cancer is gone .”
    “They did a scan. I had pain in my hip, so they did a scan.” There was a pleading note in Elizabeth’s voice now.
    “I knew you should’ve gone to Penn. Or Hopkins! What were you thinking, dealing with these local yokels?” Piper stood up, nodding her head decisively. “We are calling Hopkins today !”
    “Piper.” Elizabeth closed her eyes. “Piper, please sit down.”
    “So, tell me,” Piper said, acidly. “What does your Dr. Firestone propose to do about this?”
    There was a long silence. Elizabeth leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. When she looked back at Piper, there were tears on her face. Oh, stop it, Piper thought. You stop that.
    “It’s a team, Piper. They have a cancer team. And they said we could try a more powerful protocol along with radiation. But—” She broke off and took a deep, sobbing breath.
    “But what?” snapped Piper.
    “They said it might buy me a few months.” Elizabeth’s voice was suddenly quiet and steady. “They said the side effects could be severe. I told them no.”
    Piper felt as if her breath had been vacuumed out of her body with a whoosh . In her chest, where the air used to be, a bird was beating its wings as hard as it could. She tried to speak and, after a moment, discovered that she was opening and shutting her mouth. Like a goddamn fish, she thought, like a goddamn fish out of water. She