I trusted Janet when she said she would handle the estate attorney and the placement paperwork because she had more free time.

That was my first mistake.

Fourteen months ago, my mother had a bad fall in the hallway.

Her hip was fine, but the confusion afterward was terrible. She kept calling out for her own mother, looking at the ceiling with wide, terrified eyes.

Janet called me two days later from her Mercedes.

“I found a place,” she said, her voice completely calm, as if she were reserving a hotel room. “Meadowview. It is forty minutes away, but they have a vacancy in the memory care wing.”

I didn’t argue. I was so tired, my bones felt like lead.

But when I tried to go visit that first Sunday, Janet sent me a text.

“Mom is having a highly agitated day,” the message read. “The doctors say no visitors for forty-eight hours.”

I stayed home.

The next Sunday, it was a different excuse. “They are adjusting her blood pressure medications, Sarah. She is sleeping constantly.”

And then the next Sunday, and the next.

Every time I called the facility, the desk clerk told me that Janet had given specific instructions that Mom needed quiet adjustment time.

I believed her because I wanted to believe my sister wouldn’t use our mother as a weapon.

I actually defended her to my husband.

“Janet is just stressed,” I told him, sitting at our kitchen table while the tea went cold. “She is just trying to do what is best for Mom.”

I feel so stupid writing that now.

Looking back, the signs were all there.

Janet stopped answering my calls. Whenever I texted her asking for an update, she would wait three days and send a single sentence about how the facility was handling everything.

I was completely shut out, but my own guilt kept me quiet.

I kept thinking that maybe I was the problem, that maybe my presence really did upset our mother.

Fourteen months went by.

An entire year of seasons changing, and I had not seen my mother’s face.

I wore her silver hairbrush in my purse every day, hoping that this Sunday would be the day Janet would let me in.

The brush still had a few strands of her gray hair caught in the worn bristles.

But the permission never came.

Not on Thanksgiving.

Not on Christmas morning, while my own family was opening gifts and I was staring at the snow outside.

Not on her eighty-second birthday, when I sat in my car in the Meadowview parking lot for three hours, crying until my eyes were swollen, looking up at the third-floor windows.

I cooked her favorite potato soup; my husband and I ate it in silence. The soup sat in the pot, getting cold, and I didn’t even have the heart to put it in the fridge.