I had wanted to believe the ordinary explanation, and so I had, and my mother had suffered six extra months in that basement because her other daughter chose the comfortable interpretation over the uncomfortable investigation.

I do not flagellate myself over it anymore; the blame belongs to the deceiver, not the deceived.

But I have taken one hard lesson from it, and I offer it to anyone whose vulnerable person is cared for by another at a distance: when the calls get short, when you are never quite allowed to see or hear the person directly, when every attempt to check in is smoothly deflected, do not explain it away.

That pattern is not nothing.