I have not heard from Karen. I did not expect to and she was as good as her word.

Thomas is still fine. I checked once more, in September, and then I deleted the bookmark, and that’s the last useful thing I have to say about my father.

Laura had her fifty-fifth birthday in the break room with a grocery store cake, and there’s a retirement statement on her fridge that she has looked at more than once, and last month she said the word *someday* about a house with a garden, out loud, in front of me, and I did not offer to buy it and she noticed that I didn’t and put her hand on the back of my neck.

There’s one more thing.

When we redesigned intake, Laura changed the form. The old version had a box near the bottom, standard on every clinic form in the country, that said **ABILITY TO PAY** with three checkboxes.

She replaced it with a question, printed in the same size type as everything else, in the middle of the page where the patient fills it in themselves.