My parents tried to evict my daughter from her own home with a single cruel note, claiming they “needed space” for my nephew. They expected her to disappear quietly and me to accept it from miles away.

I stood in my kitchen rinsing lettuce for salad while Lily and Mason—Mason was over for the afternoon by then, on purpose, invited—argued upstairs about a video game soundtrack.

“It took me a long time to learn no,” I said.

“Yeah,” Rachel replied. “Me too.”

Our parents tried, in their separate ways, to reestablish influence.

Dad sent practical messages first. Bird feeder recommendations. A reminder that the HVAC filter should be changed every season. A link to an article about kitchen backsplashes because he’d noticed mine were cracking at one seam. This was his language of repair. Useful, adjacent, never fully about the injury itself. I answered some of those messages and ignored others. He did not press. That was new.

Mom tried holidays.

She mailed Easter baskets too large for one child and too childish for a teenager, as if Lily were still seven and therefore easier to please symbolically. She sent a Thanksgiving text that said Families belong together, a sentence so loaded with selective memory I didn’t answer for three days. Eventually I wrote, Lily and I will celebrate quietly this year. Hope you’re settled in. She called that cold. I called it accurate.