While I was lying on an operating table, under full anesthesia, with my chest open and my heart in a surgeon’s hands, my three children had been standing in a courthouse filing a sworn petition to have me declared incompetent.

“They needed me unconscious,” I said.

My voice did not sound like my own.

The whole thing was rearranging itself in my mind, every piece clicking coldly into place.

“That’s why they left.

It was never the parking.

The clerk’s office opened at ten.

They had the petition signed and ready, and they needed to file it and get it moving before I woke up and could say a single word to object.