Wade dropped to his knees beside my bed as a deputy came for him.

“Mom, please, we’re your family, you can’t do this to us —” “A family does not leave a mother on an operating table to go and steal her home, Wade,” I said, and I turned my face to the window.

“You stopped being able to call me your mother at ten o’clock this morning.” The deputies took the three of them out, and their protests and their excuses grew fainter down the long corridor until the room was quiet again, and clean.

One year later, the morning sun fills the sunroom of my new home — a small, bright, one-story craftsman cottage on the quiet edge of Harrison’s hospital grounds, where the air smells of coffee and orchids and the cinnamon rolls I have taken up baking again.