"Your grandmother was a menace."
"She really was." My laugh surprised me—rusty from disuse, but real. "She used to hide them around the house. My mother would open a cabinet, and there'd be a frog in a top hat staring at her."
Charlotte was laughing too, the sound warm and familiar. "That's genuinely unhinged. I love it."
We worked through the first box, then the second. She was efficient, decisive, moving through my paralysis with the practiced ease of someone who dealt with chaos professionally. We fell into a rhythm. She'd hold something up, I'd make the call, she'd sort it accordingly.
"Donate?"
"Keep."
"This lamp?"
"God, no. Toss."
"What about this?" She'd found a photo album, its leather cover worn soft with age. She opened it without asking permission, and I watched her face soften as she turned the pages.
"Oh my God." She held it up so I could see. "Is this you?"
My senior year soccer photo. Terrible haircut, cocky grin, the unearned confidence of someone who had no idea what life had in store.
"Unfortunately."
"You look so young."
"I was young. And significantly more certain about everything than I had any right to be."
"Some things don't change," she teased, but her voice was gentle.
She turned another page and stopped, her breath catching almost imperceptibly. I looked over her shoulder. It was a candid shot of the two of us at prom, caught mid-laugh about something I couldn't remember. Her dress had been green. I remembered that. Green like her eyes.
"We looked happy," I said quietly.
"We were happy." She looked up at me, and for a moment, fifteen years compressed into nothing. "Weren't we?"
"Yeah." My voice was a shaky whisper. "We were."
The moment stretched between us, fragile and charged. Then Charlotte cleared her throat and closed the album carefully.
"Keep pile," she said softly, and set it aside.
We moved into the dining room, then the kitchen. She was wrapping my mother's china in newspaper, her movements precise and careful. I watched her work, trying to find words for the gratitude stuck in my throat.
And then she noticed it.
Her gaze moved across the kitchen counter, taking note of everything: the row of pill bottles, each with a typed label and days of the week marked in my increasingly shaky handwriting. The resistance bands and balance board were half-hidden behind the couch. The stack of medical paperwork on the desk,Parkinson's Disease Management Planprinted in bold across the top sheet.
She didn't flinch. Didn't gasp. Didn't ask a single question.
She just kept wrapping china, her hands steady, her face carefully neutral.
The silence changed. It thickened. She wasn’t asking, but I could feel she wanted to. The not-talking-about-it felt worse than pity would have. It felt like a lie we were both telling, a wall going up brick by brick.
I couldn't stand it.
"It's Parkinson's."
The words came out before I could stop them: blurted, defensive, exhausted. Charlotte's hands stilled on the gravy boat she was wrapping. She didn't look surprised. Just waited, giving me space.
