Before I had put the phone down, another message arrived. This one from Lily: Mom told me what you did. You deserve it. You’ve never really been part of this family anyway.
I stared at that one longer than I stared at Victoria’s. Lily had been nine years old when her mother married my father, a quiet, uncertain child who clutched a stuffed rabbit and moved through our house like she was waiting for permission to put her feet down. Somewhere in the intervening years, Victoria had shaped her into a precise echo: the same tilted skepticism, the same practiced contempt, the same hair-trigger accusation of jealousy whenever I took up space in a room. It was not Lily’s fault, not entirely, and I knew that. But it had made her a willing instrument for a long time.
My father called an hour later. He sounded tired in the specific way he had sounded for years, a tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the ongoing work of not seeing clearly.
“Alexandra,” he began, “please don’t make this difficult.”
Not: is what Victoria said true? Not: are you all right? Just the familiar plea for me to absorb the situation quietly and allow the peace of the household to remain undisturbed, the peace being less about anyone’s actual wellbeing and more about Victoria’s comfort.
“She says she overreacted a little,” he went on, which meant Victoria had told him to say that. “But maybe it would be better if you just gave everyone some space for now. The beach house has been a point of tension for a while. She’s just trying to simplify things.”
“Simplify,” I said.
“She said you didn’t really care about the property anymore. That you were always too busy with your life in the city to come up and maintain it.”
I looked down at the trust documents, at the list of annual maintenance expenses the trust had covered, the invoices from the contractor I had coordinated with for the roof three years ago, the records from the painting job and the septic inspection and every other unglamorous task that keeping an old house functional actually requires. Victoria had never managed to get the utilities transferred into her name. Now I understood more clearly why she had kept telling my father I had abandoned the place. If he had known I was still actively caring for it, the fiction she had been constructing would not hold.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” I said. “I’ll handle this my way.”
