In the kitchen afterward, while Elias showed Ruth his cars in the living room, Aaliyah stood beside her grandmother at the sink and said, "How many more of these can I watch?"
Evelyn rinsed a cup that did not need rinsing. "As many as you choose. Or as few. The disease does not care about your calendar, baby. It only cares about hers."
That night Aaliyah lay awake and catalogued her options the way she catalogued surgical instruments: by function, by risk, by what happened if you reached for the wrong one. She could end the visits now, while Elias's memories of Ruth were still soft enough to fade into a general warmth without a name. She could continue and accept that one day her son would ask why Grandma Ruth called him by the wrong name, or didn't know the fox book's ending, or looked at Aaliyah herself with the polite confusion of a stranger. She could tell Elias the truth in pieces appropriate to five, then six, then seven—that Grandma Ruth's brain was getting tired, that tired brains forget, that forgetting does not mean loving less.
She got up at two in the morning and went to the laundry room because it had become, absurdly, the room where she did her clearest thinking. The white cabinets. The towels. The ironing board. The photographs. She looked at the picture of Elias with frosting on his chin and tried to imagine explaining to that boy that love and harm could come from the same pair of hands, and that grown-ups spent years learning how to hold both facts without dropping either.
Marcus appeared in the doorway in sleep pants and an old T-shirt, short curls flattened on one side.
"Can't sleep?" he asked.