That answer surprised me.
“You agree with me?”
“She was frightened.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No.”
Richard paused.
“I know.”
Something in his voice made me ask a question I hadn’t expected.
“What happened with Ellen?”
He looked down.
“Alzheimer’s.”
I already knew that much.
He had told me about his late wife on our fourth night together.
But apparently there was more.
“For the last two years Ellen lived at home, I made nearly every decision for her,” he said.
“At first because I had to.”
I waited.
“Then I became accustomed to deciding.”
“What do you mean?”
“I decided where she could go. Who she could see. What was safe.”
“She was sick.”
“Yes.”
“But?”
He looked at me.
“There were still moments when she could make choices for herself. Eventually, I stopped asking.”
His eyes dropped.
“Fear can make control feel like love.”
That sentence landed somewhere painful.
“When Claire contacted the cruise line,” he continued, “she sounded like someone terrified of losing her mother.”
“You spoke to her?”
“Once.”
“What did she say?”
“That you were stubborn.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Of course.”
“And that you hated being treated as fragile.”
I blinked.
“She knew that?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did she do this?”
Richard looked at me.
“Because knowing fear is making you wrong doesn’t always make the fear disappear.”
I turned toward the photographs again.
“Where is Jason now?”
“Security detained him.”
“The alarm?”
Richard nodded.
