I understood why Valerie had kept our video calls so short over the past half year, why she had always found a reason to end them quickly, why the frame had always been so tightly cropped that I never saw more than my mother’s face.

She had been hiding this.

She had been hiding my mother, sedated and suffering, in the basement of the house I had bought, and calling it care.

I should have known sooner.

That is the thought I have had to make peace with, because it is true and unfair at the same time.

Looking back, the signs had been there for six months: the calls that were always too short, the frame always too tight, my sister always finding a reason to end things before I could really see or hear our mother.

At the time, I had explained it all away, the way we explain away the things we do not want to be true, telling myself my sister was busy, that Mom tired easily, that the connection was poor.