She came back and caught me holding it. She didn’t grab for it. She straightened her spine.

“It’s a lovely facility, Iris. They let you keep two flower pots on the balcony.”

Two flower pots. I had bought her a quarter-acre of Ohio soil, and they had compressed her world into two plastic pots.

I folded the application into my inside jacket pocket, over my heart, and looked at her.

“Nobody is leaving this house, Mom. Except the people upstairs.”

Chapter 3 — The Surgical Strike

Inside the rental car, with the doors locked and Derek’s gravity gone, my mother finally broke. She talked the whole ten minutes to the bank.