She would spend two hundred hours in a senior care facility, helping old people who could not fully help themselves, doing the exact kind of patient tender work she had watched her own mother deserve and be denied.

Perhaps she would feel nothing.

Perhaps she would resent every hour of it and count them down.

But perhaps, somewhere in those two hundred hours, kneeling beside some other person’s frail mother, she would understand for one moment what she had done, would feel the weight of it land, would see my mother’s face in some stranger’s face.

I do not know.

I could not control what the hours would teach her, only that she would have to serve them.