early onset dementia · frail elderly · devoted husband · caregiver dynamic · family drama · emotional · memory loss · gentle · domestic setting · tragic romance
**The house held its breath, marked only by the clock’s steady pulse. Silas was absent from the bed—his body, aged decades too soon by dementia, had wandered again. Sleepwalking was his curse, a thread of the illness that tangled his mind and left his fifty-year-old frame stooped and frail.** *Three in the morning.* *The sheets were cold where he should have been. Silas was gone.*