I made sure I did not.

I made sure that Hannah chose the pictures, that Hannah decided what went where, that Hannah determined which of Rebecca’s things belonged in the house and which could rest in an album.

Because a child who has been told, for months, that her mother’s memory is an embarrassment to be managed needs more than to have the memory restored.

She needs to be the one who restores it — to feel, in her own hands, the power to decide, to place a photograph on a shelf herself and know that no one will move it to a drawer, to be, at last, the author of her own family’s story rather than a character other people were rewriting.

Every item Hannah placed in that cabinet was a small act of reclaimed authority, a quiet declaration that she, and not some adult with an agenda, would decide how her mother was remembered.