A/N: I know! It's been over a month since I updated, but I've been working on this chapter basically the whole time. It is actually about 10 pages longer, because I wanted her to leave Canada at the end of it, but I'm not finished with that part yet, so, think of this is Chapter 7 Part 1. Kind of. I *should* have the next part up by the end of this week because I'm so close! Thanks to everyone who's still reading! And Happy Valentines/Desperation Day!

Also, if the ads on FFNet bug you like they bug me, if you'd rather read it there, I post this story on the barneyrobin livejournal community. Here's a link to part 7 over there: .

As always, please enjoy and review!

VII

The next morning wakes Robin early; so early there's still moonlight shining though the curtains, casting strange and unnatural shadows along the walls. She lays buried under a heap of blankets, unconsciously hiding herself from the drafty window like she used to when she was small. The cold here has a wildness to it that doesn't exist in New York City, a way of seeping in though the storm windows and hundred-year old walls she's no longer used to. The morning noises, too, are different here: just the distant scurry of small animals outside, the rattling of branches. No cars, no buses or trains calling out under the night sky.

Still wrapped in the warm wonder of dreaming she is somewhere she isn't, Robin notices none of this outright. She is waking gradually from a dream she doesn't yet know is a dream (the hands touching her only phantom hands, the laughter only a representation of her subconscious.) Yet, as the last trails of sleep flit away, the feeling of being somewhere unfamiliar doesn't leave her. Without even opening her eyes, she knows she isn't in her room in New York City.

It's the sheets - probably made with some kind of satin or Egyptian cotton, probably expensive – that throw her, coupled the fact that she remembers, almost to the point that she still feels, Barney's voice rumble in her ear late into the night, coaxing her tired body to sleep. Tentatively, without opening her eyes, she reaches her hand across the bed, extends her fingertips until she reaches the edge. When she doesn't feel anyone, she opens her eyes and sits up.

She's alone.

The antique clock on the nightstand reads 4:30am. The curtains are a hideous floral print, there's snoring coming from a room down the hall, and the dresser has no unfolded clothes arching their traitorous limbs out of its drawers. This isn't her room. Then she sees her suitcases on the floor, their contents overflowing, her airplane boarding pass on the nightstand, and her phone in bed with her on the other pillow.

And where she is and why come back to her. Of course she's alone.

She remembers then it was the phone that pressed warm against her ear the night before, the hum of his sleep voice broken down to sound waves that traveled across hills and cities and skies to reach her.

Not for the first time in her life, Robin feels homesick. And it's still too early for her to do something stupid like call him again, or call any of them. So instead, she lets herself sink back into the covers and pulls them up to her neck. She stares at the ceiling wide-eyed for a few minutes, waiting for sleep to come again, maybe for her to fall back into dreaming of him, before she thinks about the implications of wanting to. She isn't surprised when sleep doesn't come.

What Robin needs is to get out of the house. What she needs is a cigarette.

So she takes the pack out of her purse and tiptoes down the stairs.

Barefoot, the kitchen tile makes her realize consciously for the first time how far away she is from New York City, how cold it is here. Then through the kitchen windows, she sees the backyard covered by a thin layer of untouched snow. It doesn't, though perhaps it should, deter her.

Robin goes to the hall closet, shrugs into her jacket, slips her bare feet into her mother's winter boots. She opens the back door slowly, knowing it has always creaked. Stepping out onto the porch, the snowflakes crunch beneath her feet. She stands there with cold hands, no gloves, fumbling with the lighter and box of cigarettes. She nearly spills them all onto the grass.

"Shit," she says as she catches them. She sticks one between her lips and jams the rest back into her coat pocket with the crumpled box to deal with later.

Once it's lit, ducks her hands into her pockets because the wind chill is getting to her already. Still, the stiff Ontario air is what she needs on a morning like this. They all have to be at the hospital by 8:30 to meet with the oncologist. Robin needs the cold to wake her into the reality of all this, to snap her out of that dream she doesn't want to think about.

She steps off the back porch, switches which hand she's using for her cigarette every few steps to warm it in her pocket. She pulls the fur hood up over her head. Then she starts to walk. She spends her first morning in Ontario trudging through snow; not the powder-soft kind that you can kick up, but the kind hardened over by frozen rain that cracks and breaks apart as you push through it and sucks you in like quick sand. She walks through their neighborhood, walks to an empty park she played at maybe twenty years ago, completely different now with new swings and a jungle gym. She doesn't stop to reminisce, just keeps walking, lights another cigarette.

She can't help but concentrate on the fact that now, nothing in her life is going to be the same. Even if the treatment works—even after, she corrects herself—Even after the treatment, Robin will always have that nagging worry that the cancer will come back, maybe appear somewhere else. Her parents' mortality is something she will never think of in the same light again. People don't just keep living forever. She keeps reminding herself.

It's still the kind of early where Robin can't see another person and it feels like she's alone in the world. To the west, her family's house. To the east, the sun's lazy half-light rising over the first snow. There's something about being alone at the edge of a clearing, something about perspective. How there's so much else out there. Or something. She can't completely grasp the way it starts to revive her.

Standing there in the snow, rubbing her hands together, Robin makes herself a thousand promises to visit more often, call more often, be a better daughter, be the kind of person her mother would want her to be.

She's almost numb from the cold, but she only notices when the wind blows against her face, when the wet snow makes its way into her boots. By the time her second cigarette is all but burnt to the quick, it's time to head back. She traces her own footprints, not wanting to mar the glitter sheen of the still untouched snow around her.

She goes in through the kitchen door, leaves the wet boots and jacket in the closet. Then she makes her way through the house, quietly, pausing at the top of the stairs because she's heard a sound. She turns to look, thinking Katie might have heard her get up, or worse, her father. The last thing she needs at 5 in the morning is a lecture on smoking.

But it's neither of them.

It's her mother. Standing in the hallway, bracing herself against the wall with one arm, hunched over, crying.

Robin rushes over to her. In a second, everything about the phone call and the dream and the calm of the night turned morning are gone from her.

"I fainted," her mother says. "Third time since yesterday."

She laces her arm around her mother's back, supporting her until she calms down.

"I was getting a drink of water," her mother manages. In a whisper. And it's unclear whether she's trying to be quiet or if she doesn't have the air left after crying to make her any voice louder.

"You could have called my cell. I would have gotten it," Robin says.

"No," is her mother's response. "I didn't want to wake you."

"I was up already. I usually wake up before 4 to get ready for work. I couldn't sleep later than that."

Her mother doesn't say anything in response, only allows Robin to lead her back to the bedroom and put her in the bed. Her father, on his opposite side of the bed, turns over and mumbles, "What's going on?" and "Are you okay?" to Robin's mother.

Her mother is overcome, Robin thinks with the decreased mobility the doctor must have warned her about. Maybe she didn't take him seriously enough.

In her mother's silence, Robin answers, "She's fine. I'm going to get her a drink of water. Go back to sleep."

Robin doesn't like to see all this has already taken away from her mother: the right not to be a prisoner in her own bed. And she wonders what will happen when she goes back to New York and Katie back to college. If her father and Aunt Carol with manage. How they will manage.

Finally, around 5:40am, Robin crawls back into her own bed, the sheet and blanked pushed back and cold, to sleep for two more hours, to wait for the day to really begin.

Later that morning after their father leaves for work, Robin and Katie go with their mother and Aunt Carol to the hospital to meet with the oncologist. Robin's mother is waiting for her chemotherapy injection and to talk to the doctor about the fainting, at Aunt Carol's insistence.

"It's probably nothing serious," Aunt Carol said at breakfast. "But we shouldn't take any chances."

Robin's father works during the day, so it is just the women sitting in the waiting room, paging through magazines without really reading them; Robin's mother doesn't even put up a calm façade. Instead, she leans her head back against the wall, eyes closed, dreading, Robin knows by the expression on her face. The other three sneak glances at her from behind the magazines they aren't reading.

It is almost 9:00 in the morning and they are still waiting, even though the appointment was set for 8:30, even though Robin's mother is sitting with them there in a wheeled chair with her eyes closed, wishing she were home already. Robin can see it in her face though she wishes she couldn't.

She tries to stop watching her mother. She reads an article about the life of fishermen then looks at some advertisements for boats, which remind her of Becky and makes her put the magazine down. She regrets not bringing something to do while they wait. She scrolls through her cell phone contacts, not planning to call or message anyone, just for something to look at.

Inside the hospital, it's a different world. Uncomfortable chairs with Kleenex boxes scattered around for the families of the people who don't make it out. The sterility of it gets to Robin, somewhere deep down. The garbled voices on the intercom. The incomprehensible language of doctors. The way all the nurses smile as they pass by the waiting room as if those smiles could make up for what everyone's going through. Birth, sickness, and death mean something different inside these walls than outside them; something like a science to be studied, evaluated, hypothesized; something cold and sterile and accepted and all-encompassing; something in the air.

Robin gets up to fill a Dixie cup with water from a dispenser in the corner. She brings one for her mother without her asking.

Not long after, a nurse comes to take Robin's mother to her appointment and the three of them sit, waiting again. When Aunt Carol exhausts the hospital's supply of available reading material, she begins to list for Robin and Katie the side effects of chemotherapy and what they can expect from their mother. She has this talk down to a science, having helped out with support groups after winning her first battle against breast cancer.

Aunt Carol explains, "The hair begins to fall out about a week after starting chemotherapy. For some, it's worse than the nausea – a physical representation of how they've been feeling. I kept it together pretty well until my hair started coming out."

Robin, of course, remembers. She can visualize it: the chunks of dark hair on her aunt's pillow, on the soft-bristled hairbrush she used those first two weeks, the plastic basin her mother used to rinse her hair, how they used to hide the long strands that came out – shove them into their pockets, push them under the bed or pillow – when her aunt was around. How Aunt Carol used to cry, asking for a mirror that Robin's mother wouldn't give her. Then she remembers the colorful headscarves her mother started to buy from mail-order catalogues, how her mother would tie them around her aunt's head and say, "Now you're making a fashion statement," and how this would cheer her up, get her smiling again.

God, her mother is going to go though the same thing.

And Robin isn't going to be in the room this time, collecting the strands of her mother's fallen hair to hide or braid together. She's going to be back in New York, back home at the bar laughing at the latest incident in Lily's kindergarten class, or whatever pick-up-line Barney's planning to use that night, or Ted and Marshall's criticism of said pick-up-line. She's going to be moving on with her life.

Damnit, she thinks.

Aunt Carol manages to cover "diminished immune system" and "nausea and vomiting" on her list of side effects and how they affected her before the oncologist finally shows up.

He's young, mid thirties, about as young as doctors come. Dark hair, strong cheekbones. If he weren't her mother's oncologist and it were a few weeks ago, Robin might have had a thing for him.

"Scherbatsky?" he calls out, reading from his clipboard.

The three of them stand up as he approaches. He slides his pencil behind his ear and extends his hand to them. He seems to recognize Katie.

"Nice to meet you," Aunt Carol says and shakes his hand.

Katie responds with a familiar, "Hello," while Robin echoes her aunt.

He motions for them all to sit down. Then he pulls up a waiting room chair and sits across from them, casually, the way a friend might. The way Barney always does when he's the last to arrive at McLaren's. Then he introduces himself as Dr. Taylor.

"She's doing fine," Dr. Taylor begins, looking at each of them in turn. "Good news first?" he asks. "Not that the bad news is badnews."

"Good news first," Aunt Carol says. By her demeanor, Robin can tell she is neither surprised at the mention of bad news nor worried about it. "So it takes the sting out of the bad."

Robin isn't sure if she agrees with her aunt's logic. She would have asked for the bad news first, maybe under the illusion that it would be replaced with the good minutes later. But she doesn't say anything. Aunt Carol is in charge here. Robin and Katie sit in her shadow.

"It'll be a few more days before we can remove the stitches, but she's healing nicely from the biopsy. It probably won't even leave a scar." The doctor stops right there as if he's forgotten about the bad news.

"And the bad news?" Katie asks. She's folding and unfolding the cover of last month's E magazine as it rests on her lap. A nervous tic she didn't know her sister had.

The doctor pulls out his clipboard, flips a few pages back and says, "She mentioned a minor fainting spell early this morning and two yesterday. At this point, dizziness, even fainting and weakness, are common while the body is adjusting to the treatment. But, it's always better to err on the side of caution."

Aunt Carol nods like she knows what the doctor is going to say before he says it, as if being a cancer survivor and survivor enthusiast makes her somehow telepathic, omniscient in situations like these. How earnest she is almost makes Robin feel guilty for resenting it.

The doctor continues, "So we ran a quick blood test. It's nothing too serious, but she seems to be developing an iron deficiency. We'll know for sure when the results come back, but I'm fairly certain it's anemia."

Aunt Carol nods her head again, still apparently unfazed, while a look of terror flashes across Katie's face. No doubt, she's probably running through Aunt Carol's list of complications and side effects, trying to remember exactly what anemia caused and was caused by. Robin isn't sure what kind of expression lines her own face; she is numb, self-aware, distant.

But something tells Robin to reach out for her sister's hand - to try and calm her. When Katie squeezes her hand back too hard, Robin wonders if it didn't have the opposite effect. She's never been the comforting type and Katie knows it.

The doctor looks Robin in the eye and continues, "This is not an uncommon response to the chemotherapy drug we've put her on. With chemotherapy drugs, there are always side effects. You have to pick and choose which ones you are prepared to risk."

"She had anemia when she was pregnant with you," Aunt Carol says to Katie. "It's not the worst side effect. Completely manageable."

"Okay," Katie says slowly, unconvinced.

"Very manageable," Dr. Taylor affirms. "Just a simple supplement pill with breakfast and that'll be the end of it."

Afterwards, after her mother is done vomiting, after the nurse smiles at them too broadly on their way out, after Aunt Carols grasps the handles of the wheelchair and pushes her own sister, pale-faced and shaky, out of the hospital, after Robin helps lift her mother into the car, they ride home in a tense silence. Her mother has a headache and feels nauseous; she doesn't want to be touched or jostled, and every time the car turns a corner or comes to a stop at a red light, she lets loose a small groan. It is this kind of half silence, Robin thinks, that left Katie in tears at the airport.

For the twenty minutes they spend on the way home, Robin and Katie, the witnesses, try their hardest to become invisible. Maybe Robin imagines it, but sitting there in the passenger seat, breathing quietly the same air as her mother, suffering, and her aunt, who has come away from her own suffering, Robin feels out of place. She imagines one of those big moments people write novels about, imagines it happening between her mother and aunt, a conclusion reached, an understanding gained, in which, in another world where Robin and Katie don't exist, both women turn to each other at the same moment and say, "This must have been what it was like for you."

Vaguely, Robin knows the roads that lead home; she counts them as they pass, eyes never leaving the window, and releases a audible breath when finally, at the end of the journey, Aunt Carol pulls into their shrub-lined driveway.

But when they get there, the house, too, becomes silent: her mother spends hours asleep with the blinds closed, Aunt Carol catches up on work only taking breaks to check on her sister, Katie starts a research paper due on Monday. Robin is the only one without something to keep her busy.

So she goes outside and down the block to smoke. Again, she wears her mother's boots and a jacket that doesn't belong to her. Maybe because of the boots, she thinks about the phrase, walk a mile in someone's shoes. She doesn't just think about it. She keeps thinking about it. Her, walking in her mother's shoes.

Around 11:30, she finds herself in her room alone. It should be relaxing. But nothing about it brings her any sort of calm. She wants to fade back into the cold morning, into the air warmed by her own breath underneath the blankets.

Instead, she spends an hour or two sorting through the miscellanea left behind seven years ago when she first moved out. Haphazardly, she makes piles: things she doesn't want to lose forever, but that she doesn't need in New York; objects her mother might want to save for whatever reason; pieces of her childhood that she will bring back home and share with her friends; things to donate, things to trash; things to save but keep hidden.

Robin tries her best to remain objective as she divides diaries, old Polaroid pictures of her and her high school friends, clothes she would never dream of wearing again, bottle caps, high school and college diplomas, jewelry that used to be her grandmother's, ticket stubs from concerts and movies, letters from old boyfriends and American pen-pals, old birthday cards, and yearbooks between the piles.

She has never put much stock in nostalgia. It was surprisingly easy for her, just out of college, ambitious, to leave it behind with her worn ice skates and shrunken Scherbatsky hockey jersey. She was an eyes-on-the-prize kind of girl. So it's hard now, looking at her youth in piles on the floor. Part of her wants to gather it all up in her arms and throw it in the nearest dumpster. Why save any of it? she thinks. And what does it matter that she finds a picture of herself at fourteen and can't remember it, can't remember what she used to be like. But does it matter who she was then? Or who she is now?

She doesn't know.

By now it's noon and she still isn't hungry. There's something about witnessing someone throw up that sucks the desire to eat right out of her, even though it was hours ago. For lack of anything better to do, Robin steps outside the quiet house again to have a cigarette. She makes at least three excuses for why she deserves a cigarette right now in the time it takes to reach the door.

And while she's out there, she calls Barney despite telling herself not to. Something about how while dreaming of him in moments of weakness might be what she needs right now, the real Barney is something else entirely. It isn't fair to either of them, she thinks in a brief moment of clarity, for her to need him to be someone he isn't. But she ignores it.

It's the same with smoking. She's been quitting ever since she started and hasn't followed through once for more than a week at a time. And why bother quitting if it makes her feel better? There's something about Barney. She can't quite explain it. Just that in the airport he seemed like he knew how to help her. He told her to call, she tells herself.

The phone rings maybe three times and even though it's the middle of the day and he's at work, she hears, "Go for Barney," on the other end.

It surprises her to hear his voice, as if she wasn't sure she was really calling him at all. She feels so far away, like someone from a different world. She doesn't say anything at first. But he probably hears her breathing as she decides what not to say.

"Scherbatsky?" he calls. She makes a slight noise in response. "Good timing! Conference call! I'll put you on speaker."

"Okay," she says, even though she isn't in the mood. But really, what is she supposed to say? I need to talk to you because I am walking in my mother's boots and my room is full of old pieces of my childhood that I don't know what to do with? It doesn't even make sense. Besides, she has the feeling he would tell her to toss everything, which is the opposite of what she wants him to say. So by her judgment, it's probably better this way.

"Robin!" Marshall shouts.

"Hey Robin, how's it going?" Ted asks.

"Hey guys," she answers. She balances the phone on her shoulder and lights another cigarette. "It's going fine."

"How's your mom?" Ted asks.

Robin sighs. "Sick?" she ventures. "We went to the hospital for her chemo injection today. The doctor said it feels worse than the cancer. But I guess that means it's working."

"I hope she feels better," Marshall says.

"Me too. Though it means she'll probably subject me and Katie to her Humphrey Bogart fanaticism."

"Hey, he made some great movies," Ted counters.

"By playing exactly the same character over and over again." This time is it Barney. "How can you be the greatest actor of all time without any range?"

"But he did a damn good job as that hardened hero with a secret, tragic past," says Ted.

"I don't know what it is with her and those strong, introverted, stoic types. It's the same thing with my dad. It's her type."

"Daddy issues... Hot."

"Have we ever seen a picture of your mom?" Marshall asks.

"I don't know."

"I know I haven't. Your dad either," Ted says.

"I'll bring one."

She listens as one of them crushes up a beer can. She would bet Marshall for the satisfied noise he makes as he's crushing it. "Graaaah," he roars.

"Well you aren't missing anything," Ted says, then takes a drink. She can hear him swallow it. "Everyone except me has been pulling 12 hour workdays. What time did you get home last night, Marshall? 3?"

"3:08."

"I was here all night," Barney says. "Helping that new intern set up her log-ins." Someone, probably Barney, swallows. "Laying the groundwork for her forward mobility within the company."

"Is this some fancy way of saying you slept with Marcy?" Marshall asks.

"Marcy? Who's Marcy?"

"The new intern."

"Oh, that's her name?" his voice echoes. "Well she didn't mind being called Michelle all night long. What up?"

Ted, she assumes, is the one who finally high-fives him. Since Marshall still seems distraught about it having been Marcy, whoever she is. Robin imagines her as eighteen with an amazing rack, probably blond and ditzy, probably irritating.

"But Marcy's smart," Marshall says. "And she showed me a picture of her and her boyfriend in Hawaii from their last spring break."

"No lady can resist the Barnacle."

"I don't believe you," Marshall's voice comes again. "Marcy has morals."

"Pft."

"Marcy is not one of your bimbos. You did not sleep with her."

"Okay, okay, I didn't sleep with her." But Robin can hear the wink in his voice.

"You dirty, lying man-boy," Marshall accuses.

"Well maybe it wasn't Marcy," Ted says. "Aren't there a slew of interns around here?"

"Not new interns."

"Okay, fine, I didn't sleep with her. I just had her investigate some files for me." Again, she hears the wink. But they all let it go, knowing probably that Barney could go on lying about fake conquests for hours.

"So, Robin," Ted interrupts, "What are you up to?"

It's her chance, she knows—to talk about it if she needs to. And it probably won't come around again, at least in this phone conversation. But even though she's on the edge of this feeling, this fear, she can't vocalize it. Not like this while they're drinking beer on the roof of GNB, joking about Barney and his bimbos.

So she says, "Just cleaning out some old stuff and hanging around."

"By, old stuff, I hope you mean your Robin Sparkles attire," Barney says. "If you find anything you wore on Space Teens or 'Let's Go to the Mall' I will pay you $500 for it."

"Seriously?" Ted says.

"$1000, but that is my final offer."

"Barney!" Marshall says.

Robin says the only thing she can. "I'll look."

As much as they'd like to stay on the conference call all day, Marshall says they have to get back to work. He has a 50 page legal document to read through and Barney has a 1:00 meeting with some Japanese CEO. Ted is done for the day, going home to prepare for his class and work on the drawings for the new GNB headquarters. And Robin, Robin is left to roam around in snowy neighborhood silence.

An hour later, she is out of cigarettes.

So she borrows her mom's car and pays with American dollars. When she gets home, around three in the afternoon, she calls Lily.

"How are you, honey? Are you doing okay? How's your mom?" Lily asks her. In the background, pots and pans and spoons clank together. Cabinets open and close, the tap runs.

"I'm fine," Robin answers too quickly, like she always does, automatically. "My mom's doing okay. She's sleeping."

There's a pause where Robin decides whether or not to tell her about the anemia, where Robin wonders how much Lily wants to know. It's almost as if Lily detects it, her reluctance.

"There's something else," Lily says.

Robin, on her end of the phone, back in Canada, takes a deep breath. "The doctor said something about an iron deficiency. A side effect of the chemo."

"Are you worried?" Lily asks and the sound of kitchen noises cease. "You sound worried."

"The way he described it sounded like it wasn't a big deal. But this whole thing is..."

"I'm know, sweetie. I wish we could be there for you."

"Thanks, Lily." She allows her friend's voice to calm her, wanting at the same time to tell Lily just hearing her voice helps so much. But she doesn't. She can't even figure out how to word it; it isn't her. So she says, "Thank you," again, with more finality.

As she wonders back to her qualms with honesty, a timer goes off on Lily's end.

"Oh!" Lily says.

The kitchen sounds continue. But it's too early for dinner, so she asks, "What are you making?"

"Cherry pie," Lily answers. "Marshall's been really busy this week with work, staying until 9 or 10 every day; but yesterday he got home at 3am! Can you believe it? So today he promised he'd get out on time. If he keeps his promise, he'll get to eat this pie. If he doesn't, I'll bring it over to Ted's and Marshall can just hear about how amazing it was tomorrow during one of their conference calls."

Robin laughs, then tells her about the conference call from earlier. And the weight of it all, the anxiety, lessens its grip on her.

The next few days blend together. The hospital, the house that seems so empty with everyone confined to their individual spaces, the snow that starts to melt into big dirty puddles; it all moves slowly. In the afternoons, Robin has taken to sitting in her mother's room reading the newspaper cover to cover, even the classifieds, keeping an eye on her mother over the paper. She turns the pages quietly, but her mother was always one of those mothers who could nap in front of the TV during hockey games or as Katie and Robin fought over the last yogurt downstairs, even when it escalated to a shouting match. She could sleep through alarm clocks, incorporate their noises into her dreams. Robin is the same way.

Some days, before her father comes home, while her mother is resting and her aunt and sister are working, Robin goes to the basement and marvels at the gun collection. She holds them in her hands -safety on- and aims at something far off.

On the third day, she hears another set of footsteps coming down the stairs, stepping into the musky smell of cigars smoked days, months, years ago.

"Some collection he has," her aunt says when she reaches the last stair.

"Yeah."

She watches her aunt cross the room in five large steps so that she is at Robin's side. Aunt Carol reaches forward and picks up a rifle from its designated cabinet; she angles it on her shoulder, runs her fingers over the barrel, looks through the scope. Robin knows that seven years ago, that rifle used to be her father's favorite. She wonders if it still is.

Aunt Carol holds it carefully and says, "It's been a long time."

Because she's wearing a pair of pink slipper boots over her jeans, has her hair pulled back into a bun and her reading glasses on, it's hard to see her standing in the middle of the frozen woods with a loaded rifle in her arms, holding it steady through the recoil. It's like her aunt is really two people – before and after cancer. And what's worse, is her aunt knows it and allows it.

It occurs to Robin that cancer for her aunt is the armor she hides behind, the valley where her right breast used to be, the cloud of fear that haunts her and never lets anyone get too close.

"This one's a beauty," her aunt says, setting it back on the display. "The last time I went hunting was 2009. I miss it."

But Robin isn't sure if she believes her.

"I haven't been hunting since I moved to New York," she offers.

In fact, the last time she went hunting was with Jessica Glitter. She still remembers it: the trip way up north, trailing a few caribou for nearly a day. By the time they got close enough to get a good shot, the muscles in Robin's calves had all but given out. But she was younger then. All she had to do was tell herself to keep going and she was able to. Between her and Jessica of them, they just had enough energy left afterwards to drag the carcass to the van. She guesses, to a certain extent, she misses it. But she lives a different life now. She's a New Yorker.

"In New York, I just go to the shooting range," she says.

"It's hunting season now," Aunt Carol notes. "But neither of us qualifies as resident anymore. I think we'd have to go with an outfitter now. And register in the summer, maybe."

And Robin can see on her face that she is wondering if she could still do it – the long days, the nights camped out in untamed land. She sees the doubt there.

"I know," she says. She puts her father's gun back in place. "It's alright."