Four million dollars is not nothing.

It would have set Colette and the grandchildren up for life; it would have let me spend my last years anywhere I chose.

And yet every time I turned the offer over, I arrived back at the same place.

What Evercrest was buying, and what Beaumont could not see he was buying, was not shoreline.

It was the surrender of the one thing my family had proven, at great cost, that it would not surrender.

If I sold now — after the forged deed, after the fake medical letter, after standing my ground in that driveway with a sheriff’s cruiser behind me — then everything I had fought for became merely a delay in the sale.