Read Chapter 4: — THE PAPER IN THE NOTEBOOK

Clara missed two weeks of lectures after the autumn break.

When she returned, she was thinner and far too cheerful.

Daniel did not ask why. Marcus asked three times and received three different jokes.

Then Clara lent Daniel her physiology notebook.

A folded sheet slipped from the back cover while he was copying a diagram. He picked it up automatically, intending to put it back unread.

Then he saw the heading.

Peripheral T-cell lymphoma.

The page was not a medical report. It was a handwritten transcript of an online patient forum: questions about chemotherapy, stem-cell transplantation, relapse, survival, cost, fear. Someone using the username PleaseLetMumGetBetter had written, I don't know how to stop imagining the worst.

Daniel read that sentence twice.

He placed the paper back exactly where he had found it.

For the rest of the night he read about lymphoma.

Not because he believed he could diagnose anyone from a note. He knew enough already to understand how dangerous that impulse was.

But he also knew Clara.

Her mother's name was Margaret Bennett.

Clara called her every evening.

The next day, Marcus found Daniel in the library surrounded by haematology texts.

"Since when are we doing lymphoma?"

"We're not."

"Then why do you look like you're sitting an oncology exam tomorrow?"

Daniel closed the book.

Marcus studied him, then lowered his voice.

"Is this about Clara?"

Daniel said nothing.

The silence was answer enough.

Marcus sat opposite him.

"You know something."

"I know nothing. That's the point."

"Then ask her."

"If she wants us to know, she'll tell us."

Marcus leaned back, frustrated.

"You always make restraint sound noble."

Daniel looked at the notebook in his bag.

"Sometimes it's just the least harmful option."

Neither of them knew then that Clara had already spent nights beside her mother in a district hospital, listening to doctors discuss biopsies and staging as if the words belonged to another family.

She had come back to university because Margaret insisted.

"If I am ill," her mother had said, "that does not mean you stop becoming who you are."

Clara had agreed.

Then she had cried on the train for two hours.