“It was mine.” He said it quietly but he said it fast. “Every dollar that built that house came off my back in Yellowknife. She had the deed because my mother put it in her name while I was two thousand miles away and couldn’t sign anything. I didn’t take a thing from Paige that Paige ever earned.”

“I’m not saying she deserved it.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying you lied to get a signature and you knew it was a lie when you got it.” My voice came out wrong. “You know what that means. You know that better than anybody in this house, because for five months your mother lied to me to get my compliance, and you have spent a year telling me that what she did to me was the worst thing you ever heard of.”

He didn’t answer that. He sat down on the kitchen chair by the door, the one that’s always got a coat on it, and he put his hands on his knees.

“I had seventy-two hours,” he said. “You had a tumor in you and no money and no phone and she’d have moved every dollar the second I said one honest word. I didn’t have a good option. I had one option.”