Here is what I pieced together, that night and in the days that followed, about how my mother had ended up on her knees on that patio.

Two years earlier, while I was still finishing my contract overseas, I had bought the house and handed her the keys over a video call, both of us crying eight thousand miles apart.

And I had set up more than the house.

Every month, I wired her three thousand dollars, money for utilities and groceries and whatever comforts she wanted, so that she would want for nothing.

For a while it was everything I had dreamed it would be.