The notification chimed on my phone at 6:14 AM while I was still pouring coffee. It was a text from the administrator at Pine Crest, where my mother, Margaret, has been living for the past two years.

The text was short. It said there had been a staffing change on the fourth floor and that Rosa would no longer be assigned to my mother’s care. I didn’t think much of it at first. Staff turnover is a constant headache in facilities like that. I just felt a pang of annoyance because Mom liked her.

I walked into the facility that Wednesday evening with a heavy bag of fruit and a fresh set of towels. The air in the hallway hit me like a physical weight. It smelled of floor cleaner and sour peaches, that sickly sweet scent of neglect I had learned to dread. Mom was sitting in her wheelchair near the nurses’ station, her head drooped to one side at an angle that made my stomach turn. She was wearing a faded, oversized sweater that I knew for a fact did not belong to her. Her hair, which was usually kept in a neat, soft braid, was matted and stiff.

I knelt beside her wheelchair. “Mom? It’s me.”

She lifted her head slowly, her eyes unfocused and swimming in that thick, gray fog of advanced dementia. She looked through me for a long moment, then her lips parted.

“I want Rosa,” she whispered.

It was the clearest sentence she had spoken in months. It wasn’t the usual babble or the confused questions about where her father was. It was a direct, desperate plea. She didn’t know my name, she didn’t know what year it was, but she knew exactly who she needed to feel safe.

I felt a chill go up my spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

I wheeled her back to her room, trying to keep my voice steady. The room was a mess. Her bed was unmade, with the blankets kicked to the floor, and her nightgown was bunched up near the foot of the mattress like someone had been searching for something in a hurry. My brother Gary had visited earlier that day. He was the one who handled the finances. He was the one who chose the facility. He was the one who told me last week that Rosa was too slow and needed to go.

“She’s costing us eight thousand a month,” Gary had told me over dinner at a steakhouse. He was cutting his meat with surgical precision. “The girl spends twenty minutes just brushing Mom’s hair. It’s an inefficient use of resources.”

“She loves her, Gary,” I had argued.

“She’s a paid service provider, not a member of the family,” he said, not even looking up. “I took care of it. She’s gone.”