An online AI mediator for hard conversations.

For three years, as Mom's dementia has worsened, Rachel has been the one who takes her to appointments, knows the medications, and saw the missed check-in on the camera they set up, the one that prompted this hospital visit. Thomas is six hours away by plane and visits twice a year. He's grateful. He sends money. Rachel has never complained.

The rehab discharge planner wants a plan by next month. Mom can't live alone. Rachel works 35 hours a week, has two teenagers, and just cancelled a summer trip with her older kid. She has quietly decided she's done being the only one who shows up. Thomas, for his part, has been treating "Rachel's there" as a fact of the situation rather than a choice she's making, and he hasn't said that out loud either.

What Mediator did

Rachel and Thomas each walked through their side with Mediator privately. Neither saw what the other wrote. The assistant pressed each of them on what they actually wanted, what they could live with, and what they would do if no agreement was reached. Then it generated candidate plans, scored them against both sides' priorities, and refined them round after round until no new draft could do better.

What came back was a plan neither of them had proposed, and one both could live with:

The six weeks off-duty that make 75/25 work.

Mom moves to assisted living within 30 minutes of Rachel. Costs split 75/25, with Thomas carrying the larger share. Thomas comes for two weeks, three times a year. During those two weeks, Rachel is off-duty. Six weeks a year off the call list.

That last piece is what makes the rest work. Six weeks off a year is not the expensive part of the agreement. On paper it may be the smallest concession. But it says plainly what neither of them had said before: Rachel had become the default caregiver. The new plan stops treating that as natural. When Thomas is in town, he is the plan, not "helping."

Everything else is how the agreement holds together over time:

• 75/25 on costs. Thomas earns more than Rachel and said so himself. The split scales with the financial reality, not the geographic one.
• Thomas handles the agency. Billing, replacing caregivers when they quit, sitting on hold when something goes wrong. Rachel is the medical point of contact; Thomas is the operational one.
• A drift clause with teeth. If either of them quietly carries more than the agreement assumed, the other can hire someone to fix it and bill the cost to whoever slipped. Neither has to reopen the whole conversation to correct an imbalance.

Read the full agreement →

Or see what each of them wrote privately, before Mediator ran: Rachel's statement · Thomas's statement