“Victoria is just trying to protect our family’s harmony,” he went on. I could practically hear the phrases he’d absorbed from her, parroting them without even realizing. “Banning you from the beach house—well, maybe she overreacted, but you know how tense things have been. Maybe it’s better if you just… give everyone some space.”
“By banning me from my own family’s beach house?” I asked quietly. “The house Mom’s parents built? The house she put in a trust?”
He hesitated. There was a faint clink, like he’d set a glass down. “She told me you were being difficult about the property. That you didn’t care about it anymore, that you never visited. She said she was just trying to… simplify things.”
Simplify. That was one way to describe rewriting history.
I looked down at the trust documents spread across my desk, at Mom’s signature in blue ink. I remembered her warning that Victoria would try to twist things if she could. Mom had been many things—a gardener, a storyteller, someone who could make an entire room feel warm just by walking into it—but naïve wasn’t one of them.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” I said, and I felt something settle inside of me, a quiet resolve snapping into place. “I won’t cause any problems.”
“Good,” he sighed, relief already flooding his voice. “That’s all I—”
“I’ll handle this my way,” I added.He didn’t know what that meant. Victoria didn’t either. But Mom would have.
After we hung up, I sat there for a long moment, the weight of the envelope solid in my lap, like a physical representation of something much bigger: trust, legacy, and the promise I’d silently made at my mother’s funeral, standing barefoot in the sand outside the beach house with the ocean pounding its grief into the shore.
I opened my laptop, pulled up a flight booking page, and typed in my destination: coastal Massachusetts.
My fingers moved over the keys with surprising steadiness. Morning flight. One checked bag. Return flight left open-ended.
Confirm.
It was time to go home.