I had spent, over eight months, a sum of money that would have been obscene to say aloud, and it had bought her comfort, and competent monitoring, and a measure of relief from pain, and none of those are nothing.

But the thing on her face now, the peace, was not on the invoice.

It had come from somewhere my money could not reach, and I had learned, barely in time, that the somewhere was simply us — her son and her husband’s daughter, present, unhurried, with nowhere else we would rather be.

“You did well, Bennett,” she whispered.

Her eyelids were growing heavy.

“You finally learned what matters.