“My arrangements were already taken care of. Hospice or the county would have handled the paperwork. I wasn’t going to disappear without a name.”

I stood so quickly my chair scraped across the floor.

“What did you do, Larry?”

There was nowhere for my anger to go.

He was dead.

I couldn’t call him.

I couldn’t demand an explanation.

I couldn’t even force him to sit across from me and watch the expression on my face.

I kept reading.

“If I gave you a problem you could solve, I knew you would solve it.”

That sentence hurt the most.

Because it was true.

For two years, I had constantly offered Larry things.

Coffee.

Food.

Warm socks.

Shelter phone numbers.

Once, during a brutal cold spell, I spent half my lunch break calling shelters until I found an available bed.