Some days she called me Arthur.

On those days I would answer to it, the way I had been told, and something would twist in my chest at the sound of another man’s name in her mouth, a man who could have been there and chose a checkbook instead.

But most days she did not call me Arthur at all.

She called me names I had never heard, names from somewhere far back in her long life, a brother gone for decades, a friend from a childhood two-thirds of a century in the past, a boy she had known before the world I lived in even existed.

Her mind wandered through time the way a person wanders through the rooms of a house they have lived in forever, and I learned, over those first weeks, simply to walk beside her wherever she went, to be whoever she needed me to be in that hour, to hold the thread of whatever story she was telling and follow it gently to its end.