Part 3 of 9 · 2 minSymptoms

The headaches began in the fourth week.

Behind the right eye, always after lunch, always about an hour after. A pressure like a thumb. By four o'clock I could not look at the screen, and by six it was gone as though it had never come, and I would go home and cook.

The doctor took blood. The blood was fine. He asked whether I was sleeping and I said yes, which was a lie in a small way, because I had begun waking at three and lying there planning the next day's cooking.

He asked what I ate. I said the usual.

There is a thing I did that I still cannot explain to myself, and I have had a long time to try.

I worked out, on a page, in a meeting I was not listening to, which days the headache came. Then I worked out which days the tiffin had been swapped — because it was not every day now. Some days my own dry rice came back untouched, and on those days I ate it and felt nothing at all.

The lists matched. Every one. Twenty-two swaps. Twenty-two headaches.

I sat with that page for perhaps four minutes.

Then I folded it into quarters and put it in my shirt pocket, and at twelve-forty the next day I opened the box and there was mutton, and I ate all of it.

I need you to sit with that the way I have had to. I knew. Not what, not how, not why. But I had the arithmetic in my pocket and I ate anyway, and I went home and made something for her with more care than I had given anything in my adult life.

Because the alternative was to stop.

Because for the first time since my mother, somebody was cooking for me, and the price was a thumb behind my eye, and that struck me as fair.

I have told myself since that I did not understand what was happening. It is a lie I would like to keep, but it will not hold. I understood that something was being done to me. What I did not understand was that it was not the point.

The food was not the weapon.

The cooking was.