'Are the results in yet?' No sooner are the words out of his mouth than he regrets having spoken them. Andres Miranda wishes he could catch the question in mid-air and send it back where it came from, hide it away again beneath a silence. But he can't it's too late. Now all Andres has is the chief radiologist's face, his lips a knot in the middle of his mouth, his dark eyes like two stains, as he offers Andres a smile of strained sympathy and hands him a large brown envelope. The radiologist says nothing but his very expression is a judgement: multiple lesions suggestive of a metastatic disease, for example. That, more or less, is what the knotted lips are saying. Medical people rarely use adjectives, they don't need to.