The flat was smaller than our house of course, though that bit didn’t bother me. It was out of the suburbs, closer to the promenade, near the tourist beaches. When I stood in my new bedroom, I could hear the noise of tourists, laughing, squealing, shouting, and it smelled like candy floss. He asked me if I liked it and I grunted. There were other places, he assured me, but I could tell that this was the one he wanted. It was sleek and modern inside, black glass and chrome. So different from our cluttered, cozy home, which was thick rugs and knickknacks adorning every surface. I wondered if the crisp lines and monochrome were Dad’s taste or Beth’s. Maybe this was what they both liked. Maybe everything that made home, home, was Mum. I’d told him it was fine and his face lit up at my lukewarm tolerance. I felt sick to my stomach with guilt.

Coming straight from the viewing to see Mum felt like I was the husband who buys his wife flowers because he did something wrong. But I put it out of my head; I was getting good at that. I took a deep breath before knocking. I do it every time. It’s the breath that says, Don’t expect anything, don’t let it get to you, don’t get frustrated, don’t get angry. It’s the shields-up breath.

When she didn’t answer, I opened the door myself. She was watching TV and a stream of sunshine lit up her face, making her skin glow. She was only fifty-five. When I walked through the halls of the Seaview Home building, I saw elderly people, wrinkled skin collecting in pools around their neck and elbows. Some could barely move; they had to be shifted by staff every few hours so they didn’t get sores where their paper-thin skin broke. All of them had dementia of some kind—it was a specialist home—but none of them looked like my mother. She had always been beautiful and that hadn’t changed. I topped up her roots every month so her auburn hair stayed glossy and gray-free, like she would want. It seemed to make her happy.

She looked up at me and smiled and I could breathe again. The good days were the days when she looked at me like that. When I could tell she was happy to see me walk into the room, even if she didn’t know why.

“Hi, Mum,” I said.

“Hello, hello.” She ushered me inside, “Do you want a cup of tea?”