My stepmother called just as the day was folding into evening, her voice dripping with a satisfaction so sharp I could almost see the smile stretching across her face. She told me, with deliberate precision, that I would never set foot in the family beach house again—that every lock had already been changed.

The entry rug my mother used to shake out over the porch rail each Saturday morning was gone. In its place lay a pale sisal runner that looked like it had been selected from a catalog called Coastal Serenity for Women Who Don’t Actually Like the Coast. The hallway table where my mother kept a ceramic bowl full of shells she and I had collected together was gone too. There was a narrow mirrored console instead, topped with coral-shaped candlesticks and a framed black-and-white photo of Diana and my father at some gala, both of them smiling into a life that had cost someone else everything.

The violence of that small replacement hit me harder than I expected.

People think theft always looks like disappearance. Sometimes it looks like substitution.