It was Trevor’s thirtieth birthday.

The house looked impressive from the street.

It should have.

I paid for it.

Five years earlier, after closing one of the biggest deals of my career, I bought that property outright.

I let Trevor and Kristen live there and told them it was theirs.

What I never told them was the truth that mattered most.

Their names were never on the deed.

The house belonged to an LLC called Cedarline Capital, and I was its only owner.

To them, it was a gift.

To me, it was a test.

And they were failing it badly.

The signs had been there for a long time.

Trevor stopped treating me like his mother and started treating me like an inconvenience.