My stepmother called at 11:47 p.m. on the first night in the beach house 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-view room

Not a gala rehearsal. Not a donor lunch. Not a carefully performed evening meant to build reputation. Just dinner. Adrien came. Judge Carter came, to my surprise, and brought a bottle of wine old enough to have opinions. Marta, the event-day logistical saint who had watched Vanessa’s empire wobble from three feet away and said nothing until saying something would matter, came with her wife. My father sat at the head of the table only because the ocean view was best there and admitted as much when I teased him about it. We ate sea bass and grilled peaches and bad cake from an excellent bakery because no one present cared enough to pretend homemade dessert was morally superior when one is already serving on custom ceramics.

At one point, after the plates had been cleared and the sky was gone fully dark outside, Judge Carter looked around the table and said, “It’s better like this.”

She did not mean the menu.

My father heard it anyway. He put down his glass, looked around the room—at me, at the windows, at the people Vanessa would never have understood because none of them were useful to her image—and said, “Yes. It is.”