The last couple of years seemed to have settled heavily on his shoulders. His once-dark hair was now mostly gray, thinning at the crown. His posture, always straight and confident when I was a little girl watching him fix things around the house, was slightly bent, as if he’d been carrying something too heavy for too long.
His eyes scanned the scene—the patrol cars, the uniformed officers, Victoria vibrating with rage, Lily clutching her phone like a lifeline, and finally me, standing with my suitcase by the driveway.
“Alexandra?” he said, his voice small against the roar of the ocean behind him.
“Dad,” I replied. “Did you even read what you were signing when Victoria asked you to transfer the house?”
He looked at Victoria, then at me. His mouth opened and closed. “She said… she said it was just a formality. That you didn’t care about the house. That you were always too busy with your life in the city to maintain it, to come up here anymore. She said it would be easier if—”
“Too busy, huh?”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and swiped through the photos. “These are from last year,” I said, stepping forward so he could see. “When I came up to meet with the contractors about the roof.” I swiped. “The year before that, when I hired the local painter to fix the shutters. The one before that—new septic system inspection. Every year, Dad. The trust has been covering maintenance and taxes since Mom died. I’ve been coordinating everything with Margaret.”
I turned my gaze to Victoria. “That’s why you never managed to switch the utilities into your name, isn’t it? You never had the authority.”
Something like panic flashed across her face, quickly masked by anger.
“You think you’re clever,” she hissed. “You think hiding behind legal technicalities makes you better than us. This house should have been ours. James and I are the ones who made this a real family.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The sound surprised even me. It wasn’t hysterical; it was quiet and exhausted and edged with something sharp.
“A real family,” I repeated. “Is that what you call years of excluding me? Of telling people I couldn’t make it to events I wasn’t even invited to? Of trying to rip out Mom’s roses and erase every trace of her from this place?”
Lily flinched.
“Stop it,” she snapped. “You’re making her sound like some kind of monster.”