A phone call in the night, an unexpected diagnosis, a shocking revelation - suddenly life can change forever.

'It's been here, in this bedroom, with Jack and without him, that she has found her only privacy. But now she's surrounded, day and night, by care.

Yesterday she told Colleen and Jude that her dying has changed people more than anything else she can think of, and she watched their fixed smiles as it dawned on them that this is what she wants. She wants them to keep up with her. What she is finally beginning to understand is that all those years of talk, the pleasure of idiocy, the bouts of worry, the complaints, the humouring of memory, even the offhand, underdone affection, these are the least of it. The best of it is being known. Known over time.