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THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRD STRAIGHT DAY OF my latest round of chemo. The new Phillips Family Cancer Center in Southampton is right there on Route 27, before you make the hard left toward Water Mill. Locals, not just New York people, needed a first-rate place like it out here.

I consider myself both.

The good news is that once I’m done for the day, I don’t get hooked up again for three more weeks.

Ben Kalinsky came with me the first two days, spent both nights with chemo-weak me back at my house. But I’m driving myself for treatment, and when I get home I’m cooking dinner for two.

“How do you know you’re going to be up to that?” Ben asks.

“We’ve gone over this.”

“Of course,” he says. “You’re Jane Effing Smith. How could I ever forget a thing like that?”

I power through my three hours in the chair. When I get home, I go over the presentation I’m making to Judge Killer Kane in two days, asking that the trial date be moved up. Way up. Without asking her if she can help out a girl with cancer. There’s already enough drama surrounding this case. I don’t need to provide any more for social media and the tabloids that are still standing.

I can see the headlines now:

CANCER-STRICKEN LAWYER FIGHTS OWN DEATH SENTENCE.

I don’t put it out there because I don’t want anybody’s pity. I just want to win, the sooner the better.

I text Jimmy when I’m leaving Phillips, a little after five, to tell him I’m stopping by the bar on my way back to Amagansett. I know he’ll be there, as the bar is the closest thing he has to an office, especially when there’s hardly anybody around to bother him in the afternoon.

I’ve decided that I’m going to celebrate being off the needle for the next three weeks by stopping by and letting him treat me to a shot of his very best whiskey, Midleton Very Rare, before I go home and cook up dinner for Dr. Ben and me, nothing particularly elaborate tonight, just teriyaki salmon with a tomato-and-zucchini casserole on the side. A choice of red or white wine.

You only live once.

I’m nearly to Sag Harbor, having gone past Elise Parsons’s old house, when Jimmy calls and asks how close I am, there’s somebody he wants me to meet when I get to the bar.

When I walk in, I see that he apparently wants me to meet Jesus, much sooner than I’d anticipated.