Twenty eight hours on the ward and I came home to a second refrigerator humming beside mine. My daughter-in-law looked at my badge and told me that one was hers and that I should buy my own food from now on. Everything I had bought that morning, four hundred and fifteen dollars of it, wore a strip of yellow tape with her name on it. My son stood behind her, rubbing his eyes, telling me not to make it a big thing, that everyone needs boundaries. By Friday her name was on the shampoo in my bathroom and on the white casserole dish my husband gave me before he died. Then Wesley ate cereal I had paid for and suggested that if the house made me uncomfortable I might find somewhere that suited me better.

So I let the tape stay and started watching instead. The locked second refrigerator. The midnight grocery bags. The mailbox key gone from its hook after eighteen years.