I walked to the sideboard and retrieved copies of the trust summary Margaret had suggested I keep on hand. I handed them to the agent.
She skimmed them. Her expression shifted quickly from polite interest to alarm.
“I… I see,” she said. “Well, I’m terribly sorry for the confusion. I was under the impression—”
“You were under the impression I had something that belonged to her,” I said. “It’s a common mistake.”
The agent flushed. “I think I should leave.”
She packed up her things in record time and practically bolted for the door, heels clicking a retreat.
Victoria stood in the middle of the living room, chest heaving, eyes blazing. “This place is wasted on you,” she snarled. “All this emotion poured into a pile of wood and stone. You don’t even care about what it’s worth.”
“Oh, I care,” I said softly. “Just not in the way you mean. This house is priceless. The market has nothing to do with it.”
“You think you’ve won,” she spat. “This isn’t over. You can’t keep me out of this family forever.”
I smiled then—not cruelly, just tired and certain.
“I don’t have to keep you out,” I said. “You’ve been doing that all by yourself.”
For the first time, I saw something beyond anger in her eyes.
Fear.
Victoria left in a swirl of perfume and outrage. She didn’t slam the door this time. She closed it carefully, as if afraid of breaking something she no longer had the power to repair.
In the months that followed, the storm around the beach house slowly died down.
Lily started visiting more regularly.
At first, she arrived like someone testing ice—one foot, then the other, ready to spring back if it cracked. We took cautious walks along the beach, talking about neutral things: her classes, my job, random memories from childhood. Then one day, about halfway through a conversation about nothing particularly important, she stopped and said, “Do you remember that year you brought me here just the two of us?”
I did.
It had been the summer before Mom got sick. Victoria had been away at some conference, and Dad had been swamped with work. Lily had been fourteen, and I’d been seventeen, home from my first year of college. I’d driven us both up to the beach house in my old beat-up car, windows down, music blaring.
“You taught me how to body surf,” she said, smiling faintly. “I thought I was going to drown. You kept telling me to relax and just go with the wave.”