On April 25, 2016, I got a phone call from Rayya. “Are you sitting down?” she asked, just like people do in the movies. I sat down. “They found tumors,” she said. “Lots of them. Not just in my liver. In my pancreas, too.” The breath left my body and for a long moment did not come back.

Rayya Elias had been my best friend for years. But she was more than just a friend. She was my confidante, my consigliere, my bodyguard, my safe person. She was my first phone call in any emergency and also at any moment of celebration. My dependence upon her was absolute. The other truth was that I was in love with Rayya, but I’d been hiding that fact from her (and from my husband and even from myself) for many years by that point, unwilling to disturb the delicate ecosystem of our friendship or to jeopard

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