I sat with the size of it.

He had stood in the hospital corridor and told Renata the house was his family’s, that I had no claim on it, that its solidity was one more wall between me and my son.

And it turned out the house had been bought, in part, with my own family’s collateral pledged behind my back.

The very floor he’d planned to keep me off had my father’s fortune in its foundations.

There was something almost funny in it, if you were the kind of tired I was by then — he had built his fortress on my land and never once looked down to see whose ground he stood on.