My mother looked away. Her voice was small. “The house was never really ours, Matthew. Not in the way we thought.”
She hesitated, then whispered a name that turned my bl00d to ice.
My brother Trevor.
I felt the ground tilt. “What did he do.”
My father swallowed hard. “He said you agreed. He said you asked him to take care of it.”
That was the moment the night changed shape. The rain, the street, the city all faded. Only betrayal remained, sharp and immediate.
I opened the back door of the car. “Get in. Both of you. Right now.”
They obeyed without argument, soaked and shaking, carrying their entire remaining world in thin plastic. I drove to the nearest hotel without asking questions. They needed warmth before words. I checked them into a suite large enough to breathe in. I ordered food they barely touched. I watched my mother stare at the bed as if it belonged to someone else.
Only when they were wrapped in dry robes, hands around hot mugs, did my father begin.