“Mom told me yesterday that you took her home away from her,” he said quietly.

Marisol waited.

“I actually asked her when exactly she started believing it was her home to control in the first place.” “What did she say?” “She said that because I lived there, she just assumed the property belonged to me too.” A long, painful silence stretched across the line.

“And I realized,” Dorian went on, “that I encouraged that assumption every single time I let her call it my house without correcting her.” Marisol looked at the wall-mounted thermostat down the hall.

“Yes,” she said.