“You would throw your own mother out into the street?” she cried.

“No,” I said softly.

“I am only going to stop enabling you.

There is a difference, though I understand you have never once had to learn it.”

In the months that followed, the investigation confirmed what the cold house had already told me.

The prosecution established that Raymond had been deliberately abandoned without care during an acute medical crisis, that money meant for his treatment had been spent on luxuries, and that his morphine had been poured out and replaced with tap water.