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.

I laughed once, quietly. “Do you hear yourself?”

Evelyn entered then, along with one of the officers and the locksmith. The officer’s presence, I think, was the only reason Diana kept her voice down.

I moved from room to room, not quickly, not performing outrage, just seeing. That made it worse somehow. The kitchen still had the same windows overlooking the back dune grass and the same chipped tile by the sink where I had once dropped a glass jar of peach preserves when I was eleven, cried in terror, and been met by my mother’s laughter instead of anger. But the copper pot rack was gone. The blue-striped dish towels she loved were gone. The small brass bell that used to hang by the back door to call us in from the beach was gone.