She turned her head slowly and looked at me. She didn’t smile. She didn’t cry. Her blue eyes were milky, staring at me with a polite, vacant curiosity.

“Are you the new nurse?” she asked quietly, her hand reaching for her water pitcher. “The other girl usually brings my tea.”

The fourteen months of isolation had taken their toll.

The mother who used to make peach cobbler and laugh on the back porch was gone, slipped away into the fog of her illness while I was locked outside.

I won the legal battle. Janet was stripped of her guardianship, and she has to pay back every cent of the legal fees from her own pocket.

But the win felt completely flat.

I sat down in the chair beside her, took the silver hairbrush out of my purse, and began to brush her hair.

“No, Mama,” I whispered, pulling the brush gently through her white curls. “I’m not the nurse. I’m Sarah.”

She didn’t answer.

She just looked out the window at the gray sky, letting me brush her hair in silence. We sat there for two hours.

That is how things are now.

I go there every Sunday, and sometimes she remembers my name for five minutes, and sometimes she doesn’t. There is no grand celebration, no happy ending where everything is fixed.

We just sit by the window and watch the clouds move over the auto plant.

But I am there, and she is not waiting anymore.