If you’re watching this, hit subscribe and tell me where you’re watching from. I’m Dorothy Mitchell—Dot, if you’ve ever borrowed sugar—sixty-eight, one week post–hip replacement, still dizzy on pain meds and gripping a walker too big for me. My quiet Toledo house had only just begun to feel safe again when Ashley called, her bright, brittle voice already turning her problems into my duties.

“You’re home doing nothing anyway. I’m dropping the kids off for the week.” Click. I stared at my black screen reflection—gray roots, yellow bruises from surgical tape, and that familiar tightness in my throat that only family can mix with equal parts love and dread. The surgeon ordered weeks of rest, but even the kettle seemed to shout in the silence Ashley left behind.

Ashley has treated me like unpaid staff since the day she married my son. Need a sitter? Call Grandma Dot. Cleanup? Grandma Dot. Forty-three years of nursing and a husband buried three years ago never counted in her math. And right on schedule at 2:30, the doorbell: Ashley marching up the walk, with Emma tugged behind, Jake wrestling Lily, and a one-eared rabbit dangling like punctuation.

She breezed in, dumped two garbage bags—one splitting to reveal a bald doll that smelled like fryer oil—and rattled off instructions. Emma makes sandwiches. Jake still wets the bed. Surely I still had plastic sheets. “I just had major surgery,” I said. “I can barely walk.” “Oh, please, Dot. You’re being dramatic.” Then purse, phone, door, perfume like a cold draft. The house went quiet again—too quiet.