And now the deathbed was a woman fluffing a pillow, and my rehearsed grief had nowhere to land, and it curdled, in the space of a few seconds, into something I had no name for yet.

I kept waiting for a monitor I’d missed, a tube, some sign that the scene in front of me was more complicated than it looked.

There wasn’t one.

The simplest explanation was the true one, and the simplest explanation was that my mother was fine, had always been fine, and that the terror that had nearly put me through a red light on the way here had been manufactured, deliberately, by the people who were supposed to love me, as a tool to open my wallet.

Brady stood near the foot of the mattress, relaxed, thumbing through his phone.