I did not stay to argue, because there was nothing left to argue about, and because the most important thing in that house was not the house at all.

It was the woman holding my hand.

I took my mother upstairs, to the small windowless room near the garage where they had put her, and I gathered the few belongings that had been pushed in there with her, and then the two of us walked out the front door together and did not look back.

Five miles away, I checked her into a quiet suite at a good hotel, the kind with soft lighting and thick carpet and a door that locked.

I ordered her a hot meal and made her eat all of it, which took some doing, because she kept saying she wasn’t hungry, and I could see that somewhere in the last two years she had gotten out of the habit of being taken care of.