My stepmother called just as the day was folding into evening, her voice dripping with a satisfaction so sharp I could almost see the smile stretching across her face. She told me, with deliberate precision, that I would never set foot in the family beach house again—that every lock had already been changed.

I walked farther in. The living room walls, once a soft cream my mother used to say made the late-afternoon light look like honey, had been painted a colder gray. The slipcovered sofa she insisted was practical because “people with wet swimsuits do not need velvet” had been replaced by a structured white sectional that no sane person with sand on their legs would ever sit on. The bookshelves still stood, but many of the books were gone—especially the cluttered paperbacks my mother read each summer and stacked sideways in cheerful defiance of order. In their place were decorative boxes, framed photos, and large objects no one had ever touched and no one ever would.

“I told her not to paint over the cream,” Madeline muttered from behind me, and I turned in surprise. She had followed us inside, sunglasses pushed up into her hair now, revealing eyes so like my father’s it hurt to look at them too long. “It made the place look colder.”

It was the first honest thing I’d heard her say all morning.

Diana swept in after us. “As if your mother had exquisite taste.”

I stared at her. “You really cannot help yourself, can you?”

“Don’t start with me in this house.”