And I want to record that I thought about it for a genuine, ugly four seconds before I answered, and that what I wanted, in those four seconds, was to say yes and go home.

“No, Your Honor,” I said. “I’d like it to be me. But I’d like the court to appoint a professional conservator for the financial side, separately, and I’d like to be removed from any decision involving the money.”

Patricia told me afterward that no petitioner has ever asked her for that.

He is at Cottonwood Ridge three years now.

The first year he knew me most days. He was angry a great deal of it — the good afternoons were the worst, because he had enough of himself back to understand where he was and who had put him there, and he said things I am not going to write down.

The second year he stopped being angry, which everyone treated as a mercy and which I found unbearable, because it wasn’t peace. It was subtraction.