Dean and his team of investigators would be here in an hour to interview her. The ones who stayed last night were in the dining room drinking their coffee. Their hushed whispers permeated the rooms downstairs. I didn’t know how any of them planned to get anything out of Mom when she mostly said one-word phrases—yes, no, please, thank you. I’d barely heard her string more than two sentences together. Not sleeping wasn’t going to help either. She’d fallen asleep at some point, though, because I had peeked in on them when I had woken up at six to use the bathroom. Everything on the bed had been untouched, and they had been curled up on the cold wooden floor, even though there was a rug in the center of the room. She hadn’t even taken a pillow to sleep on. I had shut the door quietly and tiptoed back to bed, but I hadn’t been able to fall back to sleep again because I couldn’t get the image of them sleeping on the floor out of my head. Why would she sleep on the floor like that?

Dad’s alarm had gone off at seven thirty, and Meredith had been running around the house all morning. She was determined to have breakfast on the table for everyone by nine, but I had a feeling people weren’t going to eat much. But that was how she was. Any time we had company, no matter what the occasion or how long they were staying, she made sure to feed them. She was at the grocery store picking up a few things for the omelets.

“Dad, can I have a cup of coffee?” I asked, leaning against the counter.

He looked up from his phone. He’d been lost in his screen since I sat down, barely glancing up when Meredith left.

“You know—” He stopped himself. “Sure. Go ahead.”

“What?” I asked in disbelief. The joke was always that I asked, he said no, and I begged until he promised me something sweet in return.

He shrugged before going back to his phone. I stood slowly and walked over to the refrigerator. Part of me wanted to cry. It wasn’t about the coffee. I didn’t care about the coffee. It wasn’t even like it was the first cup of coffee I’d had in this house. He’d quit playing our game. Mom was back, and everything was going to change, even the parts of our life that I loved.

Some of my favorite traditions were when we celebrated Mom. Her birthday was one of my favorite days of the year, right behind Christmas. It was a vacation day whether we had obligations or not, and we spent most of the year planning it. One year we had gone on a hot-air-balloon ride and released balloons carrying messages we’d written to her after we were in the sky. Dad kept saying we were already halfway to heaven, so he was sure they’d make it there. Another year we went to Disneyland. They weren’t always such huge deals. Sometimes they were smaller. Once we stayed in bed in our pajamas all day watching videos of her and eating chocolate ice cream. We picked out gifts for her at Christmas and included her name on our New Year’s Eve lists. So much of our world had revolved around recognizing and remembering her. What would we do when she was here?