I had spent years reading the fine print that other people skimmed, closing the deals other people fumbled, understanding, down to the last clause, exactly who owned what and how and why.

And I knew, standing in that rain, a fact that my husband and his mother and his sister had all, somehow, allowed themselves to forget.

That house had never belonged to Ethan.

Not the walls he had just locked me out of.

Not the doors.

Not the locks whose code he had so cleverly changed.

Not even the lawn beneath his family’s feet, or the balcony, or the nursery, or a single brick or beam or square inch of any of it.

It was mine.