“You always have been.

You’re just bitter because your sister has a child and you don’t.

What do you even need properties for?

Who are you going to leave them to?”

It was meant to wound, and once it would have, precisely there, in the soft place my mother had always known how to find — the marriage that had not produced a child, the thing she could always reach for when she needed me to fold.

Vance laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, from behind, a gesture that looked like comfort and was a command.