My mother had been sedated because her wakefulness was inconvenient to a business.

She had been reduced, in my sister’s mind, from a person to an obstacle, a thing that might wander and talk and disrupt the smooth operation of a house full of rent-paying strangers, and the solution to the obstacle was to switch her off.

That is the thing that turns my stomach even now, more than the theft, more than the forged papers: the casual reduction of a living woman, our own mother, into a problem to be chemically managed for the sake of cash flow.

My sister had not seen a mother in that basement.