How she had shrunk in such a short while, I couldn’t understand. I held her bony hand in mine, rubbing it on my cheek, desperate to feel something of her as I’d known her before. Her fingers were warm, and I felt a faint throbbing as she breathed laboriously from a cylinder by the side of the bed. Over the edges of the mask, her panicked eyelids fluttered, and I couldn’t tell if she knew I was there.