“Linda, honey, you’re freezing,” I said, reaching to wrap my coat around her shivering shoulders.

She flinched — not at me, but at the sound of a blind snapping shut next door. I glanced over. Mrs. Gable, our notoriously nosy neighbor, had her face pressed to her living room glass, watching the humiliation unfold.

Linda’s voice, when it finally came, was so fragile it almost broke apart in the wind. “Tom,” she whispered, teeth chattering. “Ethan changed the code.”

A cold dread, entirely separate from the rain, coiled in my gut. “What? That’s impossible. Let me try.”

“He told me to wait outside,” she continued, her eyes hollow. “He said I was making too much noise in the kitchen. He told me to go to the store, and when I came back the red light was on.

I typed it in, Tom. I typed our anniversary. It didn’t work. He told me through the intercom not to make a scene.”

I stared at the woman I’d loved for almost forty years. She looked like a stray that had been kicked out into the street. Ethan was our son. Our only child.

The boy I’d taught to throw a baseball in this very yard. The boy whose college tuition we’d mortgaged our retirement to pay.

I stepped up to the keypad, wiped the rain off the buttons, and punched in the numbers.

Beep-beep-beep. Solid red light. Access Denied.

I punched it again, harder. Access Denied.

“He told me not to embarrass him,” Linda sobbed, finally letting the tears mix with the rain. “He said this house is his future, and we’ve been living off it long enough.”