Author's Note: First off, a big thank you to everyone who's read and/or reviewed over the last week or so, and for all your opinions on POV from now on. It was a mixed bag, but I've decided to go with Sherlock's POV (as you will see..) seeing as how the alternative was clairvoyant Mycroft which will just get annoying; not to mention unrealistic since there's no way he could know what's going on inside his brother's head! Also this was I figure I can try and get inside Sherlock's head a bit more...the only downside from a writer's perspective is that Sherlock POV isn't easy to write! Anyway, this is my stab at it, and I'd be really interested to know what you guys think! :)


"The hospitals are full of people dying, Doctor. Why don't you go and cry by their bedside, see how much good it does them..." – Sherlock Holmes, 'The Great Game'

July 1993.

Chicken, leek and pastry pie -Mother's favourite dish- took four minutes and forty two seconds in the microwave to reach that stage where the chicken is tender enough to let all the flavour through into the heart of the meat, but not quite so that all the taste is gone from the crust. This was how Mother requested her evening meal, but it had taken me twenty seven attempts at five different wattages and countless times in order to perfect it. Nothing less than a flawlessly executed symphony between chicken, veg and pastry would do, and it seemed that despite my best efforts, there was always, always something wrong with the result. I was open to any challenge thrown my way, but cooking was boring. Pies were boring. Spending £42.78 a week in Marks & Spencer on pies was boring and expensive, but as it was an extravagance which drove my brother Mycroft to near distraction, I'd decided it was well worth it. Irritating Mycroft – now that was never boring!

On one particular lunchtime, the metallic 'ping' of the microwave roused me from the wholly unstimulating task of draining off boiled carrots to serve with Mother's pie. Mother was in the drawing room, as she always was at this time of day. Predictable, but probably the only thing about her nowadays which was.

Doctors had taken eleven months to diagnose her with early-onset dementia. Eleven months. I ask you! Who did they have working at hospitals nowadays, and who was skipping out on the training? A whole eleven months for an inconclusive result, but one certain promise – you will start to get ill, and it's going to happen very, very quickly. I'd been noticing the signs for months: forgetting names and goals, confusion, low attention span, slow and unsteady movements. She would stand in the hallway, eyes glazed over, and call me from my room to ask if I had seen her handbag whilst all the while it was hanging on her arm. The hospital had offered counselling for me and Mycroft, but my brother had gone alone. Counsellors nowadays (any days really) were an enormous waste of space, time and money spent, paying them to do little more than encourage people to talk about their feelings, under the guise that the counsellor's office was a place you could say all the things you shouldn't be saying about your situation: that you were angry with the person who was ill, for example, or that you wished they'd die quickly and save you all the suffering. And talk about it? I didn't talk. Talking was boring.

To my mind at least, the only one with the right to complain or despair of the situation was Mother herself – she was the one losing grip on her mind whilst trying to simultaneously deal with the fact that one day she would wake up no longer recognising the faces of her children. But Mother didn't want to see a counsellor; and indeed who would want a hospital shrink standing over you, 'helping' you to accept the fact that you would be mindless and drooling within a few short years...? Complaining would get us nowhere, least of all make Mother better, and she knew it as well as any of us. The one and only thing I knew I could do for her and do well was ensure she was taken care of, but Mycroft didn't seem to agree. If my brother had had his way, Mother would have been institutionalised and our hands washed of her within minutes of her diagnosis. I wasn't going to let that happen.

Mother's dinner in hand, I left the kitchen. It would take me thirty three seconds to ascend the kitchen stairs to the entrance hallway, ascend the main staircase, and walk down the upstairs hallway to the second door on the left – the drawing room where Mother was waiting for me. I'd never consciously counted the length of time it took me to reach her; I'd simply become aware of it. Thirty seconds or less was all it would take for Mother to leave her chair and wander, have a fall or hurt herself. In caring for Mother, time had taken on new significance.

"Mother?" I put my head around the door and watched her respond to my voice. She turned my way slowly, as though there was a long relay between her ears registering my voice and her brain realising it was me speaking.

"Hello, darling." Even her voice was slower now. On the outside, she was still my mother – greying hair crowning a wrinkling but still beautiful face, eyes which seemed to have recently lost their sparkle. What was on the inside didn't normally matter to me, but with Mother I felt like I was driving blind; to the casual observer she seemed perfectly normal. Only through clear and careful observation over a long period would you notice the vacant expression in her eye or the way she seemed to droop inside her clothes, like a flower whose roots had been severed from the earth.

I crossed the room to her chair, smiling thinly as I held the tray to her.

"Can you take the cutlery, Mother?"

"Yes, yes, dear..." A hand came up, shaking, grasping the fork I offered with an unsteady hand. I'd cut up the pie and vegetables myself before I'd brought her the tray, so she wouldn't be needing a knife. Her arm went up and down over the plate, sometimes missing the food altogether, but she was getting there. When she was finished, I considered what today's lunch had told me about the progression of her condition: the meal had taken approximately thirty two minutes – more or less the same as last time. She'd choked three times on vegetables and chicken (the latter being harder for her to chew), but the softer boiled carrots she swallowed without much difficulty. She'd finished the meal in thirty eight bites and had managed to drink her tea without trouble. Interesting.

"Have you finished?"

"Yes...yes..."

I could see the bags under her eyes; knew she hadn't slept again last night after I'd put her back to bed. A symptom of the dementia was a tendency to wander at night. Once I'd settled her to bed, she would wake sporadically and roam the house, undoubtedly putting herself at risk, but there was little I could do to stop her – she hardly even knew she was doing it. I barely needed sleep myself; my body clock was completely banjaxed anyway from years of late nights, early mornings, and some nights with no sleep at all that it seemed I'd trained myself to manage on just a few hours per week. Keep it up for too long though and I'd collapse, waking up hours later with little idea of what had happened, but feeling sluggish beyond belief. Sleep dulled the sharp edges of my senses, and I couldn't have that. Especially nowadays; there was far too much at stake.

"I'm going to leave you now," I told her. I'd spoken gently, but the effect was instantaneous: her eyes flashed with alarm as a hand came out to grasp my forearm.

"Where are you going?"

"Not far. I'll be back soon, I promise." I stroked her arm. Often this was all it took for her to be calm again – an affectionate touch and an empty promise which chances were good she'd have forgotten inside half an hour. It wouldn't matter anyway – she was tired, she needed sleep. I knew that once I was gone, it would only be a matter of minutes before she dropped off, and that would leave me at a loose end for the duration of the afternoon.

As it was, I kept my promise this time. I sat with her, ramrod straight by her chair and watching as her eyes slowly began to droop and she fell finally asleep. My eyes never left her face. When I was focussed on a task, there was little or nothing which would distract me from my objective. 'Inhuman' was the word used by Mycroft to describe my obsession; the way I would get totally lost in a task and continue to function as normal (and we both considered this term in its loosest possible meaning) until it was done. He'd thought it was amusing to suggest that one of these days I would be so engrossed I'd forget to breathe. Juvenile. Not to mention practically impossible.

Once satisfied Mother was asleep, I found myself wandering further along the corridor. There was no way to escape it – Mother was taken care of for the time being, so now began the boredom.

I yanked open the door at the furthest reaches of the hallway, revealing the staircase which led to the attic bedroom I'd chosen for my own as a child. The stairs went up in a spiral, disappearing up further than the naked eye could see. When I was a boy, my father had lined the banister with glass burners into which I'd emptied combinations of chemicals and a choice of luminescent dyes, creating my own glowstick-esque lanterns to light the way to bed. The burners were still there eight years on, but the colours had long since died out. I knew my way by now well enough that the need for lights had been rendered futile, but I could never escape the memory as I swept past in my latest daydream: of Mother, Mycroft and the frustration of knowing that yet another day was passing during which I had achieved next to nothing whatever.

My room was a misshapen oval with low ceilings which had always posed a problem, even in my youth. Now though -standing as I did at nearly six feet and an inch- they weren't so much a problem as they were a complete liability, but I wouldn't change it for the world: the walls were lined with bookshelves containing dusty volumes from every age, dating right back to decades before my birth. An oak armoire held my clothes; an antique writing desk served as storage for my documents and also as a lab table. Chemicals and various dubious concoctions littered its surface, some standard compounds, some of my own invention. The bed was the crowning feature of the room (with its deep oak headboard and covers thrown in unmade disarray), and it was onto the mattress that I now collapsed – arms spread wide, pivoting on one foot and crashing downwards, bouncing a little before finally coming to rest in the middle of the bed gazing up at the ceiling. I breathed out deeply, content for the time being just to lay still and stare up at the wooden beams criss-crossing through the roof of my house. But my amusement was short-lived.

I sat up sighing, catching a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror which hung on the wall opposite the end of the bed. The face which stared back at me was the same one I'd been seeing for close to seventeen and a half years now – grey eyes, high cheekbones beneath a strained complexion of ivory skin, and a chiselled jawline which cut off roughly, giving my face an almost permanent expression of severity. I was only seventeen, but I seemed, looked and felt far older. I was told it was my eyes – they'd already seen too much. I ran my fingers through my hair, feeling its new length, wondering briefly why it was so long and finally remembering I hadn't been to the barbers in over six months. I was, as Mother had so often said, a work of art, inimitable to its creators. Not a beautiful one I didn't think, but a unique creation all the same. This was both a blessing and a curse: I could relax in the knowledge that there was not another person in the world who shared the same looks as me, for in all honesty there wasn't a single person in the six-billion strong army of mindless earth-roaming zombies otherwise known as the Human Race I would appreciate being grouped with! The negative was knowing that I could be easily searched out. Unique though I was, I was more than content to keep it to myself; unique not just in looks but in mind too. There was nobody quite like me out there, but I didn't feel alienated or alone. Instead I felt empowered. Knowing that the pedestal I was on was always one notch higher than the rest; that was what kept me going most days, and I had no desire to share that with the world.

The walls were more interesting than the ceiling, I decided. Newspaper cuttings and fuzzy paparazzi photographs, printed police summaries and my own notes were stretched willy-nilly across the wood panelling. The jewel in the crown was displayed above the headboard of my bed -The Carl Powers case- but I didn't want to look at it now. Instead I dived to my stomach and began to rummage beneath the bed, finally succeeding in pulling a large leather-bound book from the darkness below. This was Mother's logbook: every mealtime, nap and sleeping pattern was noted down so that I might monitor her deterioration over the months and years since her diagnosis. This wasn't for the hospital's use, but rather for my own personal observational experiment. No-one else but me knew of its existence.

I took down the figures and times I'd memorised from Mother's meal a few minutes earlier, added in the day's date and was about to close it when a familiar noise caught my attention. The telephone downstairs was ringing. I cocked an ear and listened – two rings in, five left to go. Twelve point seven two seconds to reach the phone before it rang off. I took off down the stairs at breakneck speed, finally reaching the extension on the wall of the corridor and snatching up the receiver.

"Sherlock Holmes."

"Mycroft Holmes," came the derisive answer. "Really, Sherlock, it's the house telephone; who else should I be expecting to pick it up?"

Mycroft. How very uninteresting. I'd been expecting his call all day - he rang every Friday at two, intending to catch me while Mother was asleep so that I'd have the time to speak to him. He continually missed the point of course: even if I had nothing better to do, the shorter straw was still talking to my brother over the phone. His voice was so monotonous; I'd often considered using a Dictaphone to make a recording of his Friday phone call and playing it to Mother to help her sleep through the night.

"Yes?" I ignored his sarcasm. It wasn't worth my time.

"I can't speak for long Sherlock, I have a meeting in five minutes." If Mycroft could hear my distaste, he didn't let it show.

"Shame..."

"I was just ringing to let you know I'll be dropping in later." Mycroft's voice was muffled – he had his mouth full. He'd skipped lunch again and sent his assistant to the chip van, I was sure of it. "I have some papers I'd like to look over with you, and it really can't wait til morning."

"Don't let me keep you from your civic duties," I said snidely. "I wouldn't want the Home Secretary to be without you for more than an hour; who knows what could happen in your absence..."

Mycroft tutted. "I finish work at five, and then I will be over. Just make sure you're in and available."

"Goodbye, Mycroft."

My brother arrived at five on the dot. He rang the doorbell first, but I didn't get up. He still had his front door key...let him use it! When he eventually made it to the lounge where I was sitting waiting for him, he appeared indifferent. I heard the door open behind me; smelt the overpowering stench of aftershave -Paul Smith, I think- and another mingled with it...women's perfume. I smiled. Was that a top button undone? And lipstick on his lapel? It was a very distinct shade – Chanel Orchard Sunset. The secretary again. How nice for him.

"Ah Mycroft, your bi-annual visit is upon us once again." I had my violin clutched tightly in both hands, running fingers up and down the strings as I always did when Mycroft visited. It seemed to calm me somehow which made his visits easier to bear, and in any case the noise of the strings drove him wild with irritation. "Forgive me for not laying out the red carpet this time – we're saving it for our more important guests; the gardener for example, and that man who came last week to unblock the kitchen sink!"

Mycroft held a large golfing umbrella in his pudgy hand and a briefcase in the other. He always had that umbrella with him. On his very worst days, I entertained brilliant Technicolor daydreams where I took that umbrella and crammed it into each orifice in turn...

"How have you been, Sherlock?"

"Changeable." I glanced up at him. "Six months does make a lot of difference with dementia..."

Clearly missing or choosing to ignore the sarcasm which was literally dripping from my every word, Mycroft would only concede a rueful smile.

"I receive regular updates from Mummy's physician as to the state of her health; Sherlock, I was enquiring as to how you are..."

"I'm fine," I said brusquely.

"You haven't been eating; I can see you've lost weight."
"I can see you haven't."

It was true – Mycroft had always been on the plump side, but he seemed to have gained an extra jowl even since we'd last spoken. Today, clad in a pale pink shirt stretched taut across his flabby stomach, he bore an uncanny resemblance to a marshmallow in suit trousers. He'd gained five...no, six pounds since I'd last seen him, and he knew it better than I did.

"Now Sherlock, let's not stray off-subject," Mycroft said, colouring delightfully in his embarrassment. "I came here to visit my family, not to provoke a row."

"Really? How very public spirited of you." I seldom had time for Mycroft and his delusion that the rare visits he paid to see Mother somehow made him a coveted candidate for Son of The Year 1993. Weekly phone calls were one thing, but he hadn't visited in person since January. Of course the cheques arrived on the first day of every month without fail, but knowing Mycroft he would have had his secretary sort that out; merely signing his name, telling her the amount and then allowing her to send it off. Besides, Mother was long past the stage where money would compensate for her beloved eldest son choosing to visit once on a blue moon. I never understood her sadness. If Mycroft didn't want to visit her, then I for one would have rather he stayed away.

"I brought these for you to look at." Mycroft had been in his briefcase and was now offering me a stack of brightly coloured booklets. I took them and began to leaf through. 'Merrydale Nursing Care'. 'High Hopes Respite Centre'. 'Beachwood House Nurses'. So this was another of Mycroft's attempts to convince me to hire help for Mother. Typical. Fruitless. I blinked once, balled up the leaflets and dropped them into the wastepaper bin beside my chair before taking up my book once again.

Mycroft clicked his teeth in frustration and retrieved the leaflets, straightening out the creases.

"Sherlock, don't just dismiss this." He indicated one of the leaflets which showed a smiling old man, wrapped in the arms of his grown-up daughter and a shoal of little grandchildren. "These people are on hire to help – to help Mummy, to help you look after her, and to help me to help you."

"We don't need your help," I almost spat. Why was this so difficult for him to understand? I had been up since five thirty officially, and on-and-off all night with Mother; every bone in my body ached with fatigue; my eyes felt as though they were superglued shut; and my head pounded like one of those tuneless heavy metal band was playing their greatest hits on amp inside my skull, but I would take it a thousand times worse before I let one of Mycroft's agency incompetents come within a hair's breadth of my mother. It was totally out of the question – Mother didn't like strangers at the best of times, let alone when they were in her house, cooking her meals, helping her dress, preparing her sponge bath... No. No-one was allowed to touch my mother apart from me. No-one else would look after her; no-one else would care for her. This was my task and I could bear it alone. We were just fine as we were; Mother and me. No-one else. We didn't need any help.

"Ought you to be getting back?" I asked Mycroft. "I'm sure the Prime Minister has some pyjamas somewhere in need of folding..."

"At least consider allowing..."

"No."

"...one of the representatives into the house to evaluate Mother's condition," Mycroft finished. "I've heard great things about all of these agencies; Beachwood House in particular has a very good reputation."

"I'm sure Mother would be pleased to know you're sending medical school rejects with a 'good reputation' to take care of her rather than the alternative." I sounded out an especially vicious F on my violin, before looking up at my brother. "Do you not think I'm capable, Mycroft?"

Mycroft's face was unreadable; or at least it would have been had he not been my older brother for nearly eighteen years. He was trying to work out how best to phrase 'No I do not' without pissing me off, seemingly unaware that there was no answer he could give that would avoid this eventuality. I waited, head tilted to one side as if interested in what he had to say.

"You're seventeen years old, Sherlock..."

"Children of eleven and twelve in this country care for their relatives."

"Rarely without the aid of a nurse or care assistant," Mycroft said.

"Well then the extra years should hand me the advantage." I picked up my bow and ran it experimentally over the strings. "How much longer do you plan on staying?"

"As long as it takes to convince you that what seems the right course of action to you might not be the best for Mummy." Mycroft got to his feet, clearly intending to appear intimidating, so I copied him. We were more-or-less the same height now, but at present I had a 6mm lead. "Please, Sherlock, I don't want to insist..."

"Insist?" I scoffed. "You and what army, Mycroft? Aren't they engaged in the Middle East on your orders anyway?"

Mycroft breathed in hard and fast, biting his lip to keep from retorting. He had always been slower when it came to wits, but made up for it by refusing to react.

"I only wish to help you," he said, speaking one syllable at a time as though trying to keep his temper intact.

"Well why don't you move back in then?" I snapped at him. "Give up your job and help care for Mother, or else shut up and go away now before she wakes up and remembers she has another son; albeit one who would rather see her rot in a nursing home than live out the rest of her days here in some level of comfort."

I was sure this would send him over the edge, but instead Mycroft almost seemed puzzled.

"Do you not find it upsetting?" he asked carefully. "Seeing Mummy deteriorate..? I would understand if you did."

"Well I don't." It wasn't a complete lie: I had been affected by Mother's illness of course, but upset? I didn't know. What seemed like an age ago, when we had received her prognosis, I'd worked out that blocking out what I felt about Mother at least helped to numb the dull aching in my chest whenever I saw her. It was a distraction I could do without, and so I did without it. It hadn't been difficult to simply remember that there were worse things happening in the world; that my own unhappiness (if it was indeed unhappiness I was feeling) mattered nothing compared to Mother's safety and wellbeing. It was my duty to take care of her, and I was more than willing to do it. As for understanding, when was the last time Mycroft had understood anything? He spoke two languages: those of science and money, and last I checked, neither was relevant to our Mother or my ability to take care of her. What got under my skin far more than Mother's illness was Mycroft's lack of effort. The woman who had carried us both, birthed us, raised us was disappearing before our eyes, and yet he would rather sit in his office and send anonymous nursing assistants to poke and prod her through her day-to-day routine. It didn't seem to bother him at all, and though I didn't always understand people and their emotional attachments, to not have an emotional attachment to one's Mother seemed yet stranger. I looked at Mycroft, studying his face for signs; anything which would clue me in as to what his game was. "Why?" I asked finally. "Do you?"

This clearly took Mycroft by surprise. He cleared his throat. "It's difficult for me, I won't deny it."

I nodded. "Yes, I've always thought it must be frightfully hard for you, sitting in your air-conditioned office thirty five miles away, and thinking of your Mother wasting away in her country house alone..."

"Why do you insist upon fighting me?"

"Because I'm bored," I said. Though this was not the sole reason, my argument with Mycroft had livened me up considerably, but he wasn't to know that. I'd have hated him to think he was proving useful to me in any way...

Mycroft had no answer to this, or if he did he was keeping it quiet. He sighed, sat down (the sofa cushions gasping under his weight) and pulled a chequebook from his interior jacket pocket.

"Do you have a pen?" he asked.

"On the table." The table (and the pen which sat upon it) was beside by armchair, but I wasn't about to hand it to him.

"At least let me write you a cheque to cover the sum of the week's food, the cost of your living etc..."

I glanced over at the number he was copying out, and raised an eyebrow. It was his usual amount. Maybe half of that would go on food. I never kept tabs on exactly what happened to the rest – whatever Mother wanted or requested; whatever would make her happy I bought without question. Finances were not the problem here, I considered...Mycroft was! Ordinarily I'd have never accepted charity from my self-satisfied older brother, and if it had been just me on my own, I never would have. But I had Mother to consider too, and she needed the money. I had to swallow my pride, but it didn't mean I had to be grateful!

I held out a hand pointedly and waited for Mycroft to drop the cheque into my palm, then folded it up and tucked it into a pocket. Whether he was expecting thanks or maybe even a fanfare was unclear. Either way, he wasn't getting anything from me.

"I'm going to check on Mother."

I was careful to treat quietly whilst approaching the drawing room, conscious that Mother had only been asleep for an hour and would gain nothing from being woken early. I wasn't expecting to see her wide awake and watching me, a knowing smile on her face so similar to the one she had worn throughout my childhood that I blinked a few times, taking it in. She'd clearly been awake for some time, and I was a tad surprised she hadn't left her chair to search for me. It wasn't uncommon for her to wake from a nap in a fit of confusion...

"That was Mycroft, wasn't it?" she asked, beckoning me over, her hand movements jerky but her voice more confident than usual. She had remembered his name. This was clearly one of her better days, but how long would it last?

"Yes." I sat beside her and allowed her to take my hand in hers. "You heard his dulcet tones, did you?"

"I thought I heard the door..."

"You did."

"Did you argue?" I could see the smile wavering, and desperately wanted to lie. Mother hated it when we argued; she always had, but it hadn't stopped us. One Christmas had been completely ruined by our gripes – we'd faced each other over the dinner table for ten minutes, our Father shouting at us to stop, Mother leaving the room in tears. I'd been eleven and Mycroft eighteen: old enough to know better perhaps, but even in those days a fight with Mycroft was a dead-cert to brighten up an otherwise inane pseudo-religious holiday people like my brother insisted upon putting on a show for.

"Yes we did." Mother could always tell when I was lying, and as a child I'd quickly learned that it really wasn't worth my while to try.

"Just a...little disagreement I hope...?"

"Absolutely," I assured her. There was a pause. Then... "Just to clarify, Mother, you are happy with me taking care of you?"

"Of course, dear!" Mother looked surprised.

"You don't want a nurse or government stooge of any kind to help?"

"No, no..."

"Excellent!" I kissed her cheek, smiling, looking at my watch. "It's nearly six," I told her. "Supper time?"

"Yes please, darling." Mother smiled. "I love you," she said, kissing my cheek and patting it gently.

"I know."

I left the room with a smile, knowing full well that Mycroft had been outside in the hallway the entire time having followed me up the stairs, and had no doubt heard mine and Mother's exchange; I'd asked for her opinion on nursing care for his benefit alone, and Mycroft knew it.

It was close to being one of the most absurdly dramatic moments of my life as I swept out into the corridor past Mycroft who had indeed been listening at the door, and was now watching me with a glare etched to his face, causing his eyebrows to visibly melt into the considerable flesh of his forehead.

"You know it's rude to eavesdrop, brother," I informed him, still smiling complacently and not caring a jot.

"This isn't over, Sherlock."

"Oh?" I couldn't resist. "When and how will you take your revenge, Lord Vader?"

Mycroft coloured deeply, and not just through anger; he deeply resented any crass reference to his onetime obsession with the genre of science fiction and had for so many years insisted that the ingeniously named 'Death Star' could one day be developed and used as a new generation of WMD by our enemies that naturally I felt compelled to bring it up as often as was possible.

"I have another meeting at seven," he said through gritted teeth, "so I will be leaving shortly. Let me say a quick hello to Mummy, and then I'll leave you in peace."

"I doubt it..." I had reached the end of the corridor by now, intent upon heading downstairs to start on Mother's supper. "Goodbye Mycroft. Give my regards to the Queen over dinner won't you?" Subversively mocking Mycroft and his job (which was rather less impressive than he would lead us to believe) was often the last card I had to play, but I made sure I played it well.

Down in the kitchens however, my rejuvenated mood didn't take long to evaporate almost completely. I felt itchy and restless from the top of my head to the tips of my toes 6ft down as I found myself longing for something -anything- to come along which might drag me out of this rut of routine and boredom into which I'd yet again descended. I checked myself angrily, shaking my head as though it would purge me of such an ungrateful and selfish state: to feel resentful towards my Mother for taking up my life with her illness was a level too low for me to consider sinking, and yet I could feel it eating away at me like a flesh devouring parasite or a slug on a lettuce leaf. I told myself it wouldn't be forever, but then the thought of her actually dying entered my brain and the alarm bells sounded; not because I couldn't bear to live without my Mother, but because for a split second I'd actually been looking forward to it! She was suffering, and despite my bravado, so was I. So was I...

With a firm swish of the kitchen knife I held, I took the crusts off Mother's pate-salad sandwich and arranged the little bread triangles on her favourite teatime plate. I looked down at my efforts, satisfied. That was better. I'd need practice blocking out all I was feeling, but it would come in time; that much I was sure of.

As I ascended the stairs once more for the drawing room, listening with relief to the sound of the gravel drive crunching under the now moving wheels of Mycroft's car as he left, I sucked in a deep breath of air. It didn't matter what Mycroft said; all that mattered to me was taking care of Mother and I could do it alone. We were going to be just fine.