“Bring him in,” he said. “Today.”

The doctor pulled him off everything. Every pill. He wanted seventy-two hours, monitored, nothing in his system but food and water. Sandra fought it. Oh, she fought it hard.

“This is cruel,” she kept saying. “You’re going to confuse him worse. He needs his medication.”

The doctor didn’t even blink. “Then it’ll show. Seventy-two hours.”

I’ll be straight with you. Part of me still thought I was wrong. Part of me thought I was about to watch my dad come apart with nothing to steady him, and that it’d be my fault. I sat in that hospital room those three days feeling like the worst daughter alive, second-guessing the whole thing.

The first day, he slept a lot. Mumbled. Didn’t know where he was.

The second day, he ate a whole tray of food and asked the nurse her name. Asked it like he meant it.

The third day, I walked in and my dad was sitting up in bed. He looked at me. Really looked at me, the way he used to. Clear eyes. No fog.

“Get me a newspaper, would you,” he said. “I want the crossword.”

He hadn’t asked for a newspaper in eight months. I had to step into the hall so he wouldn’t see my face.

When I came back in with the paper, he wasn’t doing the crossword. He was just sitting there with it folded in his lap, staring at the window like he was working something out.

“Where’s Sandra,” he said.

“Home, Dad.”

He didn’t look at me. “Don’t let her back in.”

My stomach went sideways. “Dad, what do you mean?”

He kept staring at that window. And then he said it, slow, careful, like he was scared the words would slip away from him before he got them out.

“She puts things in my tea. At night. The blue ones.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“I tried to tell you,” he said. “At Thanksgiving. But by the time I got the words lined up, the pills had already made me forget what I was even trying to say.”

Thanksgiving. I remembered it then. Him grabbing my wrist by the sink, his mouth moving, and nothing coming out that made sense. Sandra had laughed it off. “He gets like this,” she’d said, and steered me back to the table. And I’d let her steer me. I’d been embarrassed for him. My own dad reaching for me, and I’d been embarrassed.