I should tell you who I was when I came to Oakridge, because I was not anyone special, and that matters to the story.

My name is Hannah.

I was twenty-four years old.

I had finished three semesters of nursing school and then dropped out when my mother lost her job and the money simply ran out, and I had spent the months after that applying everywhere and getting nothing, until Oakridge hired me on the spot because they were short-staffed the way those places are always short-staffed.

I took the job because I was desperate, not because I had any calling for it.

I want to be honest about that.

But something happened to me in those first few weeks that no nursing textbook had prepared me for, and it changed me.

I had come expecting the work to be medical — pills in paper cups, blood pressures, bed linens.

It was that.

But underneath the medical work was something else, something no one had told me about, and it was heartbreak.

Because an assisted living facility is, among other things, a building full of people who have been left behind.

People with children too busy to call.

People who had once run households and businesses and lives, now spending their afternoons watching a parking lot through a window, waiting for a visit that came at holidays if it came at all.

I had not known, at twenty-four, that loneliness could be a full-time condition, a thing a person lived inside of for years.