So there I was, standing over that packed suitcase, my hand on the handle, ready to call a cab and figure out the rest later. And that’s when Clare slipped into the doorway behind me.

Her face was white but her voice was steady. “Grandma,” she whispered, looking back toward the dining room, “before you leave, you need to know what they were going to do next.”

She pulled her phone out of her hoodie pocket. Her hands were shaking. “I wasn’t snooping,” she said, which just about broke me, because it’s the exact thing I’d kept telling myself. She turned the screen to me. It was a photo she’d taken of papers on her dad’s desk. A signed lease. A house in Florida, a town called Naples, move-in date the first of next month. Two bedrooms. Not three. Not four. Two.

“They’re moving, Grandma,” Clare said. “All of us. Except you.” She swiped to the next photo, and my legs went soft underneath me. It was a brochure. Sunny Pines. A “senior living community” about forty minutes from where I was standing. There was a sticky note on it in Jessica’s handwriting. It said, “Tour before we list. Use Eleanor’s remaining account.”

My remaining account. The little bit of house money I had left, the cushion I’d kept so I’d never be a burden to anybody. They were going to spend my own money to put me in a home, and then drive off to Florida without me.

I sat down on that twin bed. Clare sat next to me and held my hand the way I used to hold hers when she was small. “I’ve known for a week,” she said quietly. “I couldn’t figure out how to tell you.” Then she looked at me with those steady eyes and said the thing I carry with me now. “You’re the only one in this house who ever acted like family. I didn’t want you to leave thinking you were the problem.”

I didn’t cry in front of her. I waited until the cab came.

I live in a small apartment now, two towns over, with my rocking chair finally out of its box and Tom’s photo up on a real shelf. Clare texts me every single day. Michael called once, three weeks after Naples, and left a voicemail asking if I’d “overreacted.” I still haven’t called him back. I keep thinking I will, that one of these days I’ll find the words. I haven’t yet. Some mornings I sit with my coffee and look at that suitcase still in the corner, half unpacked, and I just can’t make myself put it all the way away.