I’m paying a lot of money for these people to take care of you.” The old woman went quiet.

“I can’t keep taking time off work every time you decide to throw a tantrum,” he said.

And then he hung up.

I stood in that hallway and watched Edith Ledbetter sit with the dead phone in her hand for a full ten minutes, staring at the dark screen, not moving.

She did not cry.

I kept waiting for her to, and she didn’t, and somehow that was so much worse than tears would have been — the stillness of a woman who had done all her crying long ago and had nothing left but the sitting.

I did not know yet what her son had just called a tantrum.