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

Khloe, for her part, stole less money and more oxygen. But she had absorbed Vanessa’s operating manual perfectly. She floated through the house with expensive aimlessness and expected the world to confuse her curation for substance. She asked whether I could switch rooms permanently because the service-drive view was “actually kind of grounding for someone like you.” She borrowed a pair of my sunglasses without asking and then told me I should be glad they got “real exposure.” She ordered meal deliveries on my accounts, billed facials to the house under vague “hospitality” charges, and once had the spectacular nerve to tell a guest at a terrace lunch that I was “staying with us for a while while work got less intense.”

I heard that sentence from ten feet away while setting down glasses I should never have been carrying in the first place.

The guest, a silver-haired donor type with an expensive tan and a face permanently arranged into pleasant interest, looked between us. “Oh, how nice.”

I smiled at him.

“It’s very temporary,” I said.

Khloe laughed like I had made a charming joke. Vanessa, from the head of the table, did not look up from buttering her fish.