“What I need is simple.

You show up twice a week.

You sit in her room for an hour.

If she calls you by my name, you answer to it.

You keep her calm, you keep her content, and you keep her quiet.

Five hundred a week, in cash.

Do we have a deal?” He said it all the way you might describe a maintenance contract, a thing to be arranged and forgotten, and it took me a long moment to understand that the maintenance he was describing was a human being, and that the human being was his own mother.

What struck me most, in that office, was not even the cruelty of it, though it was cruel.