Of course, when the serious-faced surgeon had first spoken the words in the little consulting room, that other side of Sandro had thought only that this diagnosis was the deal. He had thought of the drained, white look on Luisa’s face after they had loaded Veronica Hutton into the ambulance. A life for a life, he’d thought, before his rational side tore the thought to pieces in disgust. A life for a life.
The first lucky thing was, it had not spread. The exhaustive body scans and blood tests had definitively shown that it had not spread to any other location in the body. Not the lymph, not the lungs, nowhere else. And it was a – the surgeon had said what kind of cancer it was, it had a name, but Sandro didn’t want to name it. It was the opposite of aggressive, that was what mattered, and it was tiny.
‘You were brave,’ said the surgeon to Luisa. ‘You examined the breast, that’s brave to begin with, and when you found it, you came immediately.’
Of course, Sandro had thought impatiently as he gripped Luisa’s hand, don’t you know her?
There had been no need for a full mastectomy, but Luisa had demanded one. The chemotherapy was a precaution, but Luisa had insisted on it. Brave.
On the bed, she turned her head towards him, and smiled.
Lucky.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Angus MacKinnon, without whose steadfast intelligence and belief in Sandro Cellini this book would not have been written, and my agent, Victoria Hobbs, for her clear-eyed and constant support.
The Drowning River Page 34
