I came home for Christmas in my dress blues—and stepped into a house that felt colder than the snow outside. On the kitchen counter, my mother had left a single sentence that made my hands start to shake.

In the guest room, the bed was still rumpled from where Grandpa had been lying. The thin blanket at the foot of the mattress was twisted, useless. His slippers sat crooked on the floor, one of them turned on its side. A glass of water on the nightstand had a skin of dust on the surface. There was an empty pill organizer, but not empty in the right way. Several days were still full. Others had pills missing from the wrong slots. Carla photographed that, too.

In the bathroom, we found the towel rack pulled halfway from the wall. Grandpa must have tried to grab it. There was a dark bruise-colored smear near the sink where his hand had dragged across the counter. I stood in the doorway and stopped breathing for a second.

“Ma’am?” Officer Ortiz said softly.

“I’m fine.”

But I wasn’t. I was imagining him alone in that hallway, cold and confused, gripping the towel rack with shaking fingers, trying to make it back to bed because no one had bothered to check on him before leaving for paradise.