I didn’t answer him right away. I just stood there at the counter trying to figure out how to put into words what was forming in my head. Because here’s the thing. Mrs. Garner’s blood pressure had been getting worse.

I take her readings every morning and I log them in a notebook I keep in my bag. Her numbers had been creeping up for months and her doctor had even mentioned at her last appointment that they might need to adjust her dosage. I had logged every single one of those readings. And now I was standing at a pharmacy counter holding a bag of aspirin that had been sitting in her prescription bottle.

I drove back to her house and I sat in my car for a few minutes before I went inside. I needed to think. I needed to figure out what I actually knew versus what I was guessing. So I went back through my phone. I take photos sometimes when I’m doing medication checks, especially after the bottle gets refilled, just as a habit. I don’t know exactly when I started doing that. Maybe three or four years ago after a situation with a different client where there was a dispute about whether a medication had been given. It just became part of how I work. My own personal record.

I went back seven months in my camera roll. And I found the pattern. Every two weeks, without fail, right after Derek visited, the pills were different. Derek is Mrs. Garner’s son-in-law. He married her daughter Karen about six years ago. He comes every other Saturday. He brings groceries, which Mrs. Garner always appreciates, and he refills her pill organizer, which she also appreciates because her hands have gotten a little stiff.

He’d always made a point of saying he does it to help out. “Just trying to take care of my girl,” he’d say, meaning Mrs. Garner. She’d pat his hand.

Seven months of photos. Every single visit followed by a pill change. I laid my phone on the passenger seat and I just stared at the roof of my car for a minute. I mean, what do you even do with that? I’m a home health aide making sixteen dollars an hour. I’m not a detective. I’m not a lawyer. But I knew what I was looking at.