My throat tightened. “Yes. And like the ‘real cousins’ comment.”

“I saw that,” she whispered. “On Aunt Paige’s phone once. I didn’t tell you. I thought you’d be mad.”

“I’m not mad,” I said immediately.

“I don’t want you to lose your family because of me,” she said, barely audible.

That fear — Milo as a complication, a choice that made me difficult — finally surfaced.

Ethan took her other hand. “You are our family,” he said firmly. “You didn’t cause this. That’s on them.”

She swallowed. “But they don’t like me.”

“Some people only know how to love someone who looks like them, acts like them, reminds them of themselves,” I said carefully. “That’s their limitation. Not yours.”

“So… we’re not seeing them?” she asked.

Old me would have softened it, promised reconciliation. But fixing it always required shrinking her.

“We’re taking a break,” I said. “If they want back in, there will be rules. Respect you. No jokes about not being real. No excluding you. No treating you like you’re optional.”

Her shoulders dropped, tension slipping away.

“Okay,” she said. Then barely audible: “Thank you.”

That night, my mother called. I let it go to voicemail.

Paige sent thirty-seven messages in forty-eight hours — essays, insults, crying children, threats. Mark stayed silent publicly, but texted privately:

You could’ve warned us. We took time off. Dad’s furious. Paige’s spiraling. You didn’t have to involve police.

I stared until my eyes ached. Then typed:

I called security. They called police when you refused to leave. I’ve been warning you for years. You didn’t believe me because I always backed down.

He never replied.