It was the kind of cold that seeps quietly into your wrists. Oxford in November. The air smelt like chimney smoke and old stones and the last of autumn’s ghosts. You’d taken the shortcut past Radcliffe Square, a box of takeaway Thai balanced against your ribs and a dog-eared first edition of Dylan Thomas tucked under your arm.

Jamie hadn’t answered your texts that day—not entirely unusual. He had a charming, frustrating way of disappearing into his head when he was writing or when the weather got too beautiful for the indoors. You pictured him sprawled somewhere in a half-washed jumper, reading with one ankle crooked over the other, a half-drunk mug of tea going cold beside him. You liked arriving like this: unannounced, breathless from the cold, with food and poems and that sort of reverent urgency only new love inspires.

His flat was dark except for the sliver of golden light spilling from beneath the door at the end of the hall. You knocked softly, then let yourself in.

He was sitting on the floor, legs drawn up, a record humming low in the corner—Nick Drake, Pink Moon, which you once told him made you ache in a way that felt hopeful. His head turned slowly toward you, eyes shadowed beneath the arc of his brow. That boyish charm he wore so easily—smirking, skipping syllables when he flirted—was gone. There was something cracked and still in his expression. Like someone waiting to be arrested by a truth they’d hoped might go unnoticed.

You set the food on the table, unsure whether to say something light or say nothing at all. “I brought pad thai,” you offered. “And a Welshman who liked his metaphors drunk.”

No smile. Not even the corner of one. He only blinked at you, like he’d forgotten what you looked like. Then he said, too calmly: “There’s something I need to tell you.”

You didn’t sit. You felt the air in your throat stall. He looked down at his hands. They were trembling—minutely, the way a candle trembles before extinguishing.

“I have cancer.”

The words didn’t echo. They didn’t even fall. They just hung there, perfectly still, in the dusty golden light. You remember thinking, people always talk about that word like it’s a bomb. But it didn’t explode. It froze the room.

“What…?” you whispered, your voice splitting somewhere near the center.

"It’s called multiple myeloma,” he continued, softly. “It’s a cancer of the plasma cells—in the bone marrow. It eats away at you. Bones get fragile. Immune system collapses. It’s… slow. But it always wins.”

You sat. Not because you wanted to—because your knees buckled. He looked at you then, finally. Really looked. There was something bruised and astonishing in his eyes, as if he were waiting for you to leave.

“It’s slow-growing,” he added. “But incurable. Surgery’s dangerous. Radiation… buys time.” There was a quiet, plaintive laugh in his throat. “They gave me a year. Maybe two.”

The sentence was too clean. Too cruel in its simplicity. “You should’ve told me,” you said, though it came out smaller than you intended.

“I didn’t want to become someone else in your eyes.”

Silence stretched out between you, long and taut. Outside, a motorcycle passed like a streak of metal sorrow. “You think I’m going to leave you because you’re sick?” you asked, your voice cracking open.

He shrugged, eyes glassy. “No. I think you’d stay. That’s worse.” And there it was: the sharp, trembling edge of his fear—not death, but being a burden. Being pitied. The poetry drained from his body. You saw him not as a boy you kissed beneath rain-soaked archways, not as the voice who recited Keats to you over curry at 2 a.m.—but as a man grieving his own life in slow motion.

“Then don’t be brave with me,” you said. “Be terrified. Be messy. But don’t keep this from me.”

His jaw clenched. “I didn’t want this to be the thing you remembered.”