That was the thing that went through me first, before the anger, before anything else, just the terrible lightness of her, a woman who had always been strong now weighing almost nothing in my hands.

My mother had carried me, once.

She had carried me on her hip through years when she had nothing, worked jobs that broke her back so that I would never know how close to the edge we lived, held the whole weight of both our lives on her own two shoulders and never once let me feel it.

Every good thing I had ever built, including the very money that had bought this house, traced back to a woman who had refused to let her child be crushed by the world.

And here she was, sixty-two years old, light as a bird in my arms, having been crushed after all, in the one place that was supposed to be safe, by the family she had opened her door to.