My mother did still have some mild, ordinary, age-related memory loss, the kind that so many people her age live with perfectly well.

But the vacant, unresponsive, confused woman my sister had used as a prop to justify her cruelty was a fiction, a chemical fiction, created on purpose.

My mother, unmedicated and cared for, was present.

She was coherent.

She was, most of the time, entirely herself, sharp and warm and wry, the mother I remembered.

My sister had not been managing my mother’s dementia.

My sister had been manufacturing it, deliberately, so that a healthy woman could be made to look like a burden who needed to be hidden away, freeing up her house to be gambled and rented and stolen.