"Mom, please. Talk to me. Brenda has been with us for over a decade. You can't just throw her out and bring in some biker off the street."
"He is staying." Her voice was suddenly iron, a strength I hadn't heard from her in years. "I want Louis to be the one taking care of me. Do you hear me, Margaret? No matter what."
I opened my mouth. I closed it again.
In twelve years of bathing her, feeding her, lifting her, and holding her, I had never once heard her speak to me like that. Like I was the one who didn't belong in the room.
I watched him from doorways, from hallways, from the corner of my eye over morning coffee.
Outside, through the window, Louis was kneeling in her flower beds, pulling weeds as if he had always lived there.
The weeks that followed felt like a slow war fought in whispers.
Louis moved through our house like he had always belonged, refilling Mom's water glass, adjusting her pillows, reading aloud from her old gardening magazines. Mom had handled it all herself — paperwork, payroll, even the spare key — before I'd come home that first day. By the time I thought to demand references, the arrangement was already signed.
I watched him from doorways, from hallways, from the corner of my eye over morning coffee. I waited for the slip. The greedy glance at her jewelry box. The phone call to some accomplice. Anything.
And every time I walked into the room, their voices dropped to nothing.
It never came.
"You don't have to hover, Miss Margaret," he told me one afternoon, not unkindly. "I'm not going anywhere."
"That's what worries me," I shot back.
He just nodded, like my hostility was a weather pattern he'd learned to dress for.
