“Take me to her.”

I noticed, walking, the shape of the accusation Ronan had chosen, and it told me a great deal about him. She’s lost her grip on reality.

She’s senile.

She snapped. Every word of his story required my mother to be diminished — not a competent adult who might be telling the truth, but a confused old woman whose account could be dismissed on its face.

That is the oldest move there is against the elderly, and it works because the world is half-prepared to believe it before anyone says a word: that past a certain age a person becomes unreliable, dramatic, not quite a full witness to their own life.

Ronan was counting on that reflex.