But rage came later.

What I felt first, holding my mother’s frail weight up off those stones, was something closer to grief, a vast and sudden grief for all the mornings and evenings of the past two years that I had spent believing she was safe and comfortable while she was, in fact, on her knees.

Every cheerful phone call reorganized itself in my memory in that instant into something else.

The times she had cut a call short, the times she had seemed tired, the times a shadow had crossed her face before she smiled it away, all of it clicked into a new and terrible shape.