I picked up. "Hey."
"Matthew." His voice sounded wrong. Thin in a way I'd never heard before. "I'm sorry to call so late. I just… I needed to talk to you."
"What's going on?"
"It's your mother." He took a breath, and in that pause I heard something crack. "We saw the specialist today. The one Dr. Hendricks referred us to, after all those tests."
My grip tightened on the phone. Mom had been forgetting things for months. Small stuff at first, like where she’d put her keys, whether she'd eaten lunch. Dad kept brushing it off. Just getting older, he'd say, happens to everyone. But then she got lost driving home from the grocery store last month. A route she'd driven for forty years.
"What did they say?"
"Alzheimer's." The word came out like he'd been holding it in his chest all day. "They ran more tests, did the scans, and... it's Alzheimer's, Matthew. They said it's already progressed further than they'd like. Moderate stage, they called it."
I set the takeout container on the coffee table.
"She didn't recognize Mrs. Patterson yesterday," Dad continued, his voice unsteady. "Her best friend for thirty years, and she looked at her like a stranger. I've been covering for her, making excuses, but I…" He stopped. "I don't know how to do this."
"Dad."
"She's scared. She knows something's wrong, and she's scared, and I don't know what to tell her. I don't know how to make this okay."
"You can't make it okay, Dad. It's not okay."
"No," he said quietly. "It's not."
We sat in silence for a moment, breathing on opposite ends of the line.
"We'll know more after she sees the neurologist again next week," he said finally. "They're talking about medications, things that might slow it down. But they were clear that..." He trailed off.
He didn't need to finish. I understood.
"I'm coming home," I said.
"Matthew, you have a life there. You don't have to?—"
"I'm coming home, Dad. We'll figure out the rest."
He was quiet for a long moment. "Okay," he said. "Okay."
When we hung up, I sat there in the blue light of the TV, phone still in my hand.
I thought about my mother in the kitchen where I grew up, looking at the woman who'd been her best friend for three decades and seeing a stranger. I thought about my father makingexcuses, covering for her, watching her slip away one piece at a time.
And I thought about Millbrook. I'd gone back a handful of times over the years, but I'd made an art of not really being there. Quick visits to my parents, two or three hours at most, never straying past their driveway. The town itself I avoided entirely.
I walked to the window. The street below was empty, the coffee shop dark. Somewhere in the building, someone was playing music too loud.
I didn't know how much time Mom had left. Not how long she'd live, but how long she'd still be herself. How long she'd know my face, my name, the sound of my voice.
I was going back.
Ihadto go back.
Dr. Schafer'soffice looked the same as it had for the past two and a half years. Same leather couch, same chair across from it, same box of tissues on the side table I'd never touched. The clock read 4:15. Fifteen minutes in and I'd already told her about Mom, the diagnosis, the phone call.
"So you're going back," she said.
"Yeah. Millbrook’s Sheriff's Department has a deputy opening. It's a step down, but it gets me there."
