But there was no villain.

Sherry was a woman in her fifties with a job and a marriage and her own kids and a mother aging two states away, carrying the specific guilt of the adult child who cannot be present, and everything she’d done — the Sunday calls, the twice-a-year visits, even the brochures — was love filtered through helplessness until it came out looking like control.

She wasn’t trying to take her mother’s life away.

She was trying to survive the unbearable feeling of being unable to protect someone she loved from a distance she couldn’t close, and the facility was the only tool the world had handed her for that feeling.