Chapter 1 — Don’t Touch My Back

“Don’t you dare touch my back!

Get your hands off me or I will scream until the police come!”

Edith’s voice tore down the hallway of Oakridge Senior Living and stopped the whole floor cold — froze the old gentleman over his soup in the dining room, froze the aide pushing the linen cart, froze me.

Everyone at Oakridge knew that voice.

Edith Ledbetter had lived with us for nearly three years, and at seventy-six she walked without a cane, filled in a crossword without her reading glasses when the mood took her, and could argue for half an hour that dark roast beat instant coffee and mean every word of it.

She was sharp, and she was proud, and she was, in almost every way, one of the least troublesome residents we had.

But there was one thing no member of the staff had ever once managed to do for Edith Ledbetter, in three years of trying.

Nobody had ever been allowed to wash her back.

She would let you help with her face, her hands, even her hair.

But if a caregiver’s hand drifted anywhere near her back, the woman came apart — she screamed, she slapped hands away, she locked herself in the bathroom.

Once, years before I came, she had thrown a plastic water pitcher clear across a room.

Whatever was on Edith Ledbetter’s back, she had decided that no living person was ever going to see it.

And for a long time, I assumed, like everyone else, that it was simply an old woman’s stubbornness.

I could not have been more wrong.

What she was guarding was not a quirk.

It was the bravest thing I have ever, in my life, come to know about another human being.

Chapter 2 — Twenty-Four and Desperate