Ethan wiped his cheeks with the back of his sleeve and took a slow, heavy breath.

“That’s fair.”

He reached over and picked up the blue spiral care logbook from the side table, laying it next to his printed weekly schedule on the coffee table.

The afternoon sun shifted through the window, casting a long square of light across the two pages and lighting up the neat lines of blue ink where June’s temperatures were recorded hour by hour.

By two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, the sun had broken through the winter clouds over my mother’s front porch.