I pulled a wooden chair near to her and took her small, cool hand in both of mine, carefully, the way Juliet had taught me without ever meaning to teach me anything — just by doing it, night after night, where I could have seen it any time in eight months if I had only stayed in the room.

That was the whole of my education in those final months, and Juliet was my teacher though she never once tried to be.

She did not lecture me on how to love my mother.

She simply did it, in front of me, day after day, and let me watch, and by watching I slowly learned the thing that cannot be told and can only be shown — that love is not a resource you allocate but a presence you offer, that it is made of hours and not of dollars, and that the whole of it was available to me the entire time, for free, requiring only that I stay in the room.

“Look at the water today,” my mother murmured.