It does not arrive as a blow.

It arrives as a series of small, sensible-sounding suggestions, each one easy to agree to, and only when you add them all together do you see the cage they have built.

First, Gavin persuaded my mother to close her own independent savings account, the one she had kept her whole adult life.

It made no sense, he said reasonably, for a married couple to keep their money in separate places, as though they did not trust each other.

Then he began, gently at first, to comment when she took longer than half an hour to run a simple errand down the street, a little joke about where she had wandered off to that was not entirely a joke.