The list was 114 items long.
Inge had been keeping it for eight months, since the appointment where the word "assessment" first appeared in the doctor's language. She had started with dates and names: colleagues her mother couldn't place, a street address, a former neighbor. But over time she had started noting categories. Texture. What the things that went had in common.
The pattern she had found she did not know what to do with.
The lost things fell into a shape. It was not random. It was not the standard early-stage profile she had read about on six different medical websites. The standard profile was: recent events first, older memories preserved. Her mother fit that in broad outline. But within it, the lost recent things were mostly sourced from a period her mother had never discussed directly, a period that Inge had gathered over years had been very bad. The lost older things were mostly sourced from relationships that had ended badly.
What had not gone: the house on the street Inge now had to look up because her mother couldn't tell her the name. Her daughters. The smell of Sera's mother's coat, which Inge knew about because her mother mentioned it, unprompted, on a call last month, with a kind of pleasure Inge had not heard in a while.
Inge sat with the list.
She was a nurse. She knew what the list was supposed to mean. She had read the studies. She knew that pattern-finding in grief data was a thing the mind did to protect itself from chaos.
But the list kept not cooperating.
She scrolled back to the beginning. 114 items. The most recent was from this morning: the name of the street. The house was there, her mother had said that clearly, with the detail she always had when describing it. The street name was gone.
Inge closed the list. She opened a text: "Call me when you have a minute." She put the phone down. She picked it up again and added: "I'm not worried, I just want to hear your voice."
She sent both and waited.