I watched my father throw my clothes, my books, and the last photo of my mother into the fire like my life meant nothing. Then he looked at me and said, “This is what happens when you disobey me.” I said nothing. Six years later, I called him and whispered, “Check your mailbox.”

I heard about my father through old neighbors and public records, never from him directly. He had told people after I left that I’d failed. Then that I’d disappeared. Eventually the subject dropped, the way all subjects drop when there’s nothing new to add. I didn’t follow this actively, but it reached me anyway in the casual way that information about your hometown reaches you whether you want it or not.

Meanwhile, Walter Hayes was demonstrating the pattern I had learned to read. Two missed tax payments. A second lien. The county assessor’s photographs of the property showed a roofline that had been deferred past the point of patches and was approaching the point of replacement, gutters pulling away from the fascia, the small white house my father had treated as a symbol of his authority slowly dismantling itself in the most ordinary ways imaginable.

The man who burned what I owned to teach me a lesson about power had been unable to maintain his own.