The itch started in her elbows and moved with confident swiftness. By midday Friday it was radiating down her forearms and up into her shoulder blades. She was a hypochondriac — she had inherited this from both her mother and her father, just like she had inherited her mother’s strange green eyes and her father’s sharp chin — so she was used to holding two thoughts in her head simultaneously: I am dying and I am overreacting. And so, as the day progressed, she thought: Skin cancer, fast-moving, at the same time she thought: Nothing but dry skin. She thought: Shingles, advanced, possibly a precursor to lymphoma, at the same time she thought: Coincidental mosquito bites. She thought: The initial symptoms of MS, and then she thought: Heat rash. Between meetings she read the internet for a while, but all of its diagnoses resolved in fatality. During meetings she calmed herself by remembering the few times she had gotten hives and how they had gone away. And so the day passed. That evening, having struck an uneasy agreement with herself not to panic, she undressed to shower, and that was when she discovered the scales.