“I knew she walked out of that house alive.

I carried her out myself.

That was always enough for me.”

Chapter 13 — Natalie

I did not go looking for what happened next.

It found me, that same afternoon, in the last place I’d have expected — the staff breakroom, over a cup of weak tea.

I was sitting with another caregiver, a young woman named Veronica, and I mentioned — just making conversation, my head still full of Edith’s story — that one of our residents had lived out in rural Indiana back in the eighties.

Veronica set her coffee cup down so hard it nearly went over.