Silence greeted her. Not the peaceful kind. The heavy kind. The kind that settled over a room after years of disappointment.

She dropped her purse onto the kitchen table and kicked off her shoes. Her feet throbbed from another twelve-hour shift at the assisted living facility. All day she had cared for people who weren’t her family.

Then she came home to an empty apartment. The irony was not lost on her.

For twenty years she had taken care of everyone else.

That she was forgettable.