“I came to see the world my father chose over us, and I found that he had built a cage out of gold and taught his son to live in it and call it a kingdom.

And the only person in the whole of it who seemed truly alive was a dying woman nobody had time for.

So I made time for her.

That’s all I did.

There was no plan.

I just couldn’t watch another woman die alone the way my mother did.

And there it was — the whole of her, laid bare in a single sentence, with no plan and no leverage and no demand attached to it.

She had watched one woman die alone and ashamed, and she had found herself, by an accident of employment, standing at the bedside of another woman about to go the same way, and she had simply refused to let it happen twice.