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.

“It stopped being private when Diana filed a false report with police and your daughter was forced to recover her own property under supervision.”

He looked at me then. Not angrily. Not apologetically either. Almost pleadingly. As though I might still choose to help him preserve the version of events in which he had merely been passive instead of complicit.

“You have to understand how things were at the time,” he said.

I stared at him. “No. You have to understand how things are now.”

A muscle moved in his jaw.

He came into the kitchen and pulled out a chair opposite me without asking. For a second I was thrown backward in time by the sound of those chair legs scraping tile. That was how childhood arguments began here: someone sitting down heavily, choosing a position, preparing to explain why your feelings were regrettable but misplaced.

“Your mother was very ill,” he said. “She became… determined about certain things.”

“Determined,” I repeated.

“She was angry with Diana.”

“She was accurate about Diana.”

He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Rebecca.”

I leaned forward. “Did you know the house was mine?”

His silence lasted just long enough to answer before the words came. “I knew it was in trust.”