“He forgot the simplest thing there is,” she said.

“A house is just bricks and mortar, Jessi.

It always was.

You were always the foundation.

Everything that mattered was standing on you the whole time — him, and his mother, and his sister, all of them, propped up on a woman they were too arrogant to see.

And the second you decided to step out from under them, the whole thing they’d built on you just fell.” She squeezed my fingers.

“You didn’t lose your house.