I had looked at my dying mother’s body and seen a betrayal.

It was the exact opposite of seeing.

It was the precise thing my mother had spent my whole life protecting me from having to do, and I had done it to her.

Chapter 12 — The False Bottom

At dawn, while they prepped her for a procedure, I drove home to gather her medical documents.

She had told me, quietly, where to find them: in a false bottom she had built into her old travel trunk.

That detail alone should have told me everything, long before.