Eleven months.

Long before the bruises.

Long before the petition.

Long before Michael had begun, quietly, telling people that his mother was becoming confused.

My husband had signed it while he was still relatively well, while our son was still just asking a few too many questions about the trust and the house, and I understood, holding it, that Henry had seen something coming that I had refused, for love, to let myself see.

I have had to make my peace with the fact that my husband saw our son more clearly than I did, and that he saw it eleven months before I would let myself, and that he carried that terrible knowledge silently through the last year of his life so as not to burden me with it before he had to.