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.

“A problem?” Diana echoed, her voice climbing. “I am her father’s wife. I have hosted holidays in this house. I have paid for improvements to this house. I have every right—”

“Actually,” Evelyn said, “your right to host holidays was extended as a courtesy by Rebecca’s mother during her lifetime, and later tolerated by Rebecca out of deference to her father. Those are not the same thing.”

Diana’s head turned sharply toward me. “You knew?”

The question was so naked with fury that it almost made me laugh.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Because my mother had asked me not to turn the house into a weapon. Because after she died I was twenty-three and drowning in grief and my father looked smaller without her, though I would later realize smaller did not mean kinder. Because for years I told myself that love and restraint were the same thing. Because I still thought there might be a version of family worth salvaging if I acted with enough patience.

All of that passed through me in a single instant, but what I said was simpler.

“Because I was trying not to become you.”