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“YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT,” Norma Banks says to me the next morning when she’s waiting for me in the park across the street from the courthouse.

“Don’t sugarcoat it,” I say. “Give it to me straight.”

“I know you’ve heard me say that to you before,” Norma says.

“Not something a girl forgets,” I say, “whether she’s got cancer or not.”

“Did you get any sleep?” Norma asks. “Because you look like you didn’t. How many times do I have to tell you that you need your sleep?”

“How many times do I have to tell you that you’re not my mother.”

“Am now,” Norma says. “Battlefield commission, like they used to say during the war.”

I grin at her. “Which war?”

Then I admit to her that I hardly slept at all, and explain why I couldn’t after the call from London.

I relate the conversation I had with Fiona’s husband, how she suddenly went into a downward spiral and there wasn’t even time to get her back to the Meier Clinic, it was too late and she was too far gone.

Norma says, “I’m sorry about your friend. You know I am, because she was your friend. But just because it happened that way for her doesn’t mean it’s going to happen that way for you.”

“I kept telling myself, after the last time I saw her and she’d given me her good news, that if she could beat it, so could I, Norma. Like it was some sort of sign.”

“And nothing changes with you because of the way it happened with her.”

We are about to cross the street when a limousine pulls up and Sonny Blum gets out of it.

“Holy crap,” Norma says as Blum begins to shuffle toward the entrance, helped by two bruisers in dark suits on either side of him. “He looks as if he’s on his way to the chair.”

“He is,” I say.

I tell her to pick up the pace, I’m due in the judge’s chambers.