Every instinct in me wanted to refuse.

The specialists were here.

The hospitals were minutes away.

The thought of an emergency on a quiet rural road terrified me.

But then I remembered the words she had written months earlier, on the back of that medical document in the false bottom of her trunk: If the day comes when medicine can do no more, I want to go home.

I don’t want Laura to confuse keeping me alive with saving me. My mother had known me better than I knew myself.