The medical thing she revealed at my birthday was that I had gotten a preventative double mastectomy in March, five months before the party. I had tested positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation, the same mutation my aunt had died of breast cancer from at forty-one. The surgery was massive. The recovery was worse. I had not told anyone outside my immediate family and Laney, because I was not ready for the pitying looks, the "how are you holding ups," the sudden reclassification of me in everyone's mind as "that friend who went through the cancer thing." I had told Laney because Laney was my best friend and

because I had cried on her kitchen floor and because she had told me I was brave and held my hand and promised — promised — that it was my story to tell when I was ready. At my birthday, she said, to a table of forty people, "And of course this year she got a boob job that wasn't even the fun kind, so now she has the chest of a nineteen-year-old and the attitude of a grandmother who's seen some things." Everyone laughed. Uncomfortably. Nobody understood what she meant. I laughed. I made her toast. I finished my wine. I went home at 10:45. I did not cry that night. I planned.