I picked up the bottle and counted.
Then I counted again.
The prescription said thirty tablets for the month. There were twelve left, and the refill date was only a week old.
I sat at the kitchen table staring at it until I noticed something else. Two of his medications had fresh pharmacy labels pasted over older ones. When I peeled up a corner, the dates underneath were from months earlier.
The next morning I called the pharmacy.
The pharmacist couldn’t tell me everything, but she did tell me enough. The refill schedule didn’t match what should have been in the drawer.
That afternoon I asked Dad, right in front of the caregiver, when he’d last taken his medicine himself.
He looked down at his hands.
“Before she started,” he said quietly.
The caregiver immediately jumped in. “He’s forgetting things. That’s why I manage it.”
Dad surprised me.
“No,” he said. “I remember that.”
The room went silent.
Within two days we had a meeting with the agency that employed her. Dad insisted on being there. For the first time in weeks, he did all the talking.
He told them how she’d stopped letting him handle his own pills. How she’d answer questions for him before he could speak. How she’d tell visitors he was confused when he disagreed with her.
The agency opened an investigation and removed her from his case that same week.
What came out later was ugly but simple: she had been exaggerating his decline in her reports to justify more hours and more control over his care.
A month later Dad had a new caregiver.
She called him Frank on her first day.
The second day I stopped by unannounced and found him at the kitchen table, sorting his own pills into a weekly organizer while arguing with the baseball game on TV.
He looked up and grinned.
“See?” he said. “Still know how to count.”