She genuinely believed she was the wronged party.

That, I understood in that moment, was the real disease, the thing the whole twelve years had grown out of: somewhere she had decided that love was a fixed quantity, that any of it spent on me was stolen from her, and that this justified anything.

She wasn’t lying when she said she’d done what she had to do. She meant it. In the arithmetic she’d been running since she was twenty-seven, a house and a name and our parents’ pride were things I had taken from her simply by existing and being easy to love, and everything after that had just been collection.

Chapter 13 — The House Was Already Mine

“You didn’t earn anything,” I said. “And about the house—”
I handed the yellowed letter to my father.

“Grandma saw exactly what kind of man you were turning into, Dad. And she saw exactly what Victoria was. Three days before she died, she had this drawn up. An irrevocable trust.” I watched him take it in.

“Oakridge was never yours to promise anyone. She’d already put it beyond your reach. It went into a protected trust the week she died, set to transfer to me — automatically, no conditions, nothing anyone could contest — on my thirty-fifth birthday.”