My stepmother called at 11:47 p.m. on the first night in the beach house that I bought with my own money and told me she and my father were moving in the next day, that they were taking the master suite, that her daughter would get the best ocean

That certainty didn’t make me angry in the hot way. It made everything inside me go cold and clear. She was too comfortable. Too practiced. This was not an impulse. It was a system.

“I’d like to speak to my father,” I said.

“He’s asleep.”

Too fast.

“At eleven forty-seven?”

“He’s tired, Charlotte.”

My father had not fallen asleep before midnight in twenty years.

“I’ll call him tomorrow,” I said.

“No need,” she replied, pleased now, because she thought she had won. “We’ll see you at noon. And Charlotte? Don’t start this off sourly. If you don’t like the arrangement, you’re free to stay somewhere else. You’ve always liked being independent.”

There it was. Her favorite line. For fourteen years she had used it to turn exclusion into praise.

I smiled into the dark.

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll have everything ready.”

She relaxed. “I knew you’d be sensible.”

Then I called my father.

He picked up immediately.

“Charlotte? Everything okay?”