I left the station feeling empty, but for the first time in years, the fog in my own head had lifted. I didn’t go home. I drove back to the facility. I wasn’t supposed to be there at this hour, but I didn’t care. I walked into the lobby and demanded to see the administrator.

She looked startled when she saw me, her face pale. “Is there a problem?”

“The only problem is that you let a criminal run my mother’s life for months,” I said, my voice steady. “I have a lawyer coming in the morning. And I have the police involved.”

She started to stammer, trying to deflect, but I just held up my hand. “Don’t. Just tell me where Rosa is.”

She hesitated, then sighed and pulled a file from her desk. She wrote down a phone number and an address. “She moved back to her sister’s place. She was devastated when she was let go. She told me she was worried about your mother.”

I walked out of that building and never looked back. I found Rosa a week later. She was working in a small bakery, her hands covered in flour. When she saw me, she dropped the tray she was holding. We didn’t say anything for a long time. We just stood there in the middle of the kitchen, the smell of fresh bread thick in the air, and then she started to cry.

“I tried,” she whispered. “I tried so hard to watch her.”

“I know,” I said, reaching out to take her hand. “You were the only one who did.”

We sat in the back of the bakery, and she told me stories about Mom that I would have never known. She told me how Mom used to hum old hymns while they brushed her hair.

She told me how Mom would laugh at the birds outside the window, even when she couldn’t remember her own name. She had recorded so much. It was a life I had been missing, and she had kept it safe for me.

The legal battle that followed was everything the sergeant had warned me it would be. Gary fought it at every turn. He claimed he had permission. He claimed the money was for medical expenses that the insurance didn’t cover. But when the recordings came out, and when the bank records were laid bare, there was nowhere left for him to hide. The judge didn’t just strip him of his power of attorney; he ordered a full audit of every cent he had touched for the last five years.

I moved Mom to a new facility. It was smaller, further away, but it was kind. I visited her every day. Sometimes she knew me, and sometimes she didn’t, but I didn’t mind anymore. I knew who she was, and I knew who had cared for her when I wasn’t there.