We fought it for a year. Every treatment they offered, every appointment, every second opinion we could get a referral for.
None of it worked and he passed in the March.
I was twenty-nine, buried in debt, with a one-year-old.
I took the first job I could get, which was housekeeping for a man called Ambrose Vane. Seventy-two, widowed, living on his own in a big house at the end of a lane.
What that job paid did not cover half of what I owed.
Then Hattie got properly unwell and I could not afford what she had been prescribed, and I want to describe what that is actually like, because people hear it and picture a difficult month.
It is standing at a counter with a prescription and a card, and moving your thumb over the amount on the screen, and doing arithmetic that you already know the answer to.
And that same fortnight my landlord told me I had a month.
I asked him for more time. Actually asked, on a doorstep, with my daughter on my hip, which I had promised myself I would never do.
