“Mr. Daniels,” she said to me. “Your love for your father is obvious. The dedication you’ve shown by moving home and seeing this through is admirable. I truly think you are acting in what you feel is his best interest, and I would have done exactly the same had it been my father who called.”

I nodded as nausea turned my stomach into a cesspool of bile and hope.

“But in order for me to change the current guardianship, your brother has to be proven negligent, and he’s not. He’s stable, with a proven history of caring for your father. I cannot find legal grounds to grant you guardianship, no matter how much I would like to.”

That pit in my stomach filled with dread and defeat as the sour taste of despair hit my tongue.

“Mr. Daniels,” she addressed my brother. “You have done an excellent job of caring for your father’s body. I understand the strain you must be under. Being a parental caregiver isn’t easy. You deserve to keep your guardianship based on your history. However, I would urge you to listen to your father. Though legally, he cannot be deemed competent enough for me to order a DNR on his behalf, I sincerely hope you change your mind.

“The ability to control what happens to our flesh and to choose our future is the core of our personhood. Free will is the most precious of our possessions, and to lose it is a tragedy to which there is no equal. But the compassion we show to those who lack that control—both the very young who have yet to claim it and the very old who face its loss—that is the essence of our humanity. While I don’t think you lack compassion, I do think you lack empathy for your father’s plight, and I hope you find it before he’s made to suffer again.

“I find in favor of the defendant, who will retain guardianship of Arthur Daniels.” The gavel hit the bench.

Dad no longer had a say in the rest of his life.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Six

Willow

“So how did you choose?” I asked Rose, who had just finished telling me about the love triangle she’d found herself in the middle of. Apparently where you sat at her school’s lunch table was the step before an engagement ring, and while she always sat next to Addison, her best friend, her other side was the hottest commodity at Alba Elementary.