Stuck to the kitchen door was the card that read TREV. The name was almost obscured by the novelty magnet holding it in place, which was a pair of tiny, colourful Dutch clogs. I focused on the clogs. I decided to think about them awhile in order to put off thinking about the card. One of my mother’s world-traveller nursing friends had sent her the magnet from Amsterdam a couple of decades ago. Fridge magnets had been the globetrotting nurse’s thing, her version of a postcard — they arrived over the years in the shape of London beefeaters, tuk-tuks from Thailand, sombreros, bullfighters, Eiffel Towers, and even a weensy, magnetized Mozart at his piano. She’s not married, my mother used to tell me every time she unwrapped one of these exotic, tiny trophies, as if that was the only possible explanation for a woman who seemed to be having such a great time. And yet she’d say it like she was apologizing on her roving friend’s behalf.

These days, only the clogs and one of the sombreros remained on the fridge, but there might have been a veritable magnet UN languishing somewhere behind it, for all I knew — they were cheap and would clatter to the floor if you shut the door too hard. Yet my mother, who usually had no tolerance for plastic doodads and dust-collectors, was always so pleased to receive them. It makes me feel like I’ve been there myself, she used to enrage me by saying.

Which brought me back to the card with Trevor’s personal number on it. It was my ticket out, to an extent. If I reached out to him, asked him for help as he was always encouraging me to do, I wouldn’t get to go to Amsterdam, exactly, but I could fake my freedom for an afternoon while Trevor kept an eye on Kelli. I could drive over the bridge and wander up and down Spring Garden Road for an hour or two, stop for coffee somewhere, maybe check out the fancy new library that had just opened. I could imagine myself at liberty, at least, the way my mother always said she could as she rolled the tiny clogs (or bullfighters, or tuk-tuks) between her fingers.

I tried not to think too much about what I was doing by calling TREV. I was practising self-care, I lectured myself, and that was a thing that was important for women to indulge in during times of stress. Women are bad at self-care, online articles had told me, because they are always so busy caring for everyone else. Of course, that had never really been my problem until now. Therefore, I told myself, I was inexpert at self-care, unpractised. Yes, it felt a little dodgy to be relying on Trevor — a man I didn’t really know, even though he seemed well meaning enough and was, after all, a professional caregiver, for god’s sake. And, yes, he sometimes took things weirdly personally and had kind of bullied my sister and me into accepting various acts of kindness on his part. Still, it felt like the healthy thing to do was to focus on the kindness, as opposed to those minor anxieties. There’d been too much focus on anxiety already, I decided. I couldn’t let this fog of guilt and doubt dictate my every move, couldn’t allow it to keep me stuck in this house all month, chewing my cuticles. I had to take a leap. Maybe, I thought, that was just the nature of self-care — that is, a risky proposition.