I ran to the phone in his hallway and dialed for an ambulance, my fingers shaking so hard I had to try twice. Then I sat on the floor beside him and held his cold hand until I heard the sirens. He kept squeezing the envelope, as if it was the most important thing in the world, and he pressed it into my palm. “Keep this safe until I come home,” he said.

The paramedics lifted him carefully onto a stretcher. He had slipped on the kitchen floor on Monday and had been unable to stand, but he had stayed calm and sipped water from a glass he could reach. “You did the right thing,” one of them told me. When the ambulance pulled away, I looked down at the envelope. On the front, in neat handwriting, it said, “For Eli Santos.”