And in all the years of our marriage, the legal ownership had never once changed, no matter how completely the people around me had decided to pretend otherwise.

Because his family had always behaved as if that house were their birthright.

His mother, Wendy, hosted her lavish holiday dinners in my dining room as though she had built it herself.

His sister, Stephanie, had hung her own framed portraits in my foyer and taken to calling the place “the family estate.” And Luca introduced it to his business contacts as his personal compound, as though sleeping in the master bedroom of a house amounted to owning it.

They had spent years living inside my achievement and calling it theirs, and I had let them, because I am, by nature, a quiet person, and because I had mistaken their comfort for family, and because it is a peculiar habit of generous people to let the ungenerous redraw the map of who owns what.