“And I found a dying woman in a beautiful room full of the most expensive medical equipment in the world, who had not had a single person sit beside her and hold her hand in three months.

Not her son.

Not anyone.

Just machines and strangers in scrubs.

I would learn later that the three months she named were precise, not a figure of speech.

Juliet had gone back through my mother’s own account of it and through what the staff let slip, and had arrived at the stark arithmetic of it: three months in which the master of the house, the devoted son who spared no expense, had not once sat down in the chair beside his mother’s bed and simply stayed.

I had passed through the room.