My stepmother called at 11:47 p.m. on the first night in the beach house I bought with my own money and told me she and my father were moving in the next day, that they were taking the master suite, that her daughter would get the best ocean-view room

I closed my eyes.

Of course she was.

Vanessa’s devotion to charity had always been theatrical rather than sacrificial. She loved galas, committees, donor walls, embossed invitations, and being photographed giving away sums that meant less to her than the coverage they bought. She liked philanthropy the way some women like expensive mirrors—not for what it reflected back into the world, but for the flattering shape it gave their own silhouette.

“I want everything,” I said.

“You’ll get it. But Bianca—”

“Yes?”

“If you intend to let them stay in that house while we build this, understand what you’re doing. You are choosing timing over comfort.”

I looked out at the bright slice of ocean visible from the back room window. My room now, apparently. The insult of it should have ignited me.

Instead all I felt was a cold clean readiness.

“They moved my clothes,” I said. “Timing it is.”

Over the next eighty-three days, my stepmother occupied my beach house like a woman already posing for the article she believed would one day be written about her.