I timed it, not on purpose, but because I am the kind of person who notices numbers, and the number was eleven minutes.

He came in his good coat, stood at the foot of the bed without taking off his gloves, and asked me — not Grandfather, me, over the body of the man who could hear every word — whether the will had been updated recently.

That was the purpose of the visit.

He had come to check on an asset.

My mother did not come at all, but she sent flowers, an expensive arrangement from a florist she wanted us to know she could afford, and she left the price tag on, tucked into the cellophane, whether by carelessness or by design I have never decided and no longer care.

And my sister Chloe, when I called her one bad night to say it might be soon, sighed into the phone in the way she’d been sighing at me our whole lives and said, “He doesn’t even know who anyone is anymore, Genevieve.