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.

My mother’s reading chair. My shell lamp. Two wicker side tables. The old brass telescope stand. A stack of framed family photos wrapped in towels. A cedar-framed mirror from the upstairs hall. Three kitchen canisters painted with blue fish. The little bench from the porch. And, shoved at the back beneath a tarp, a box labeled CHRISTMAS—REPLACE.

Replace.

I stood very still.

Then I pulled off the tarp.

Inside were my mother’s Christmas ornaments.

Not all of them. Enough.

The glass bird with the broken tail she loved because I had made up elaborate stories about its “battle scars” when I was seven. The paper angel with one bent wing. The tiny wooden lighthouse. The silver ball with my parents’ names painted in gold script the year before I was born.