But a deed is not a feeling.

A deed is a fact, recorded at a county office, and the fact had never once wavered.

The house was mine.

It had always been mine.

And Luca was about to learn the difference between living somewhere and owning it, in the most expensive lesson of his life.

It is a distinction that a startling number of people never make, and it goes far beyond houses.

There is a whole category of person who mistakes access for ownership — who lives inside something valuable that someone else built and paid for and maintains, and who slowly, without ever quite deciding to, comes to feel that their presence in the thing constitutes a claim on it.