I looked my father in the eye when he said I had to sign over my five-bedroom house to my sister. The table went silent, expecting a fight. Instead, I smiled and said, “Don’t worry. I took care of it.”
They thought I surrendered. They didn’t know that was not a promise; it was a warning. Because within fourteen days, everything they believed was their right would crumble with just a few clicks and a thin folder.
My name is Stella Perry. I sat at the head of the mahogany dining table, my fingers resting lightly on the cool edge of a placemat. The air in the room was warm, smelling of roasted rosemary and garlic, but the atmosphere had just plummeted to absolute zero. My father, Glen Perry, wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. He did not look at me with malice. That would have been easier to handle. Malice implies you are an opponent, someone worthy of engagement. Instead, he looked at me with the mild bureaucratic indifference of a zoning board chairman denying a permit.
“Delaney needs your five-bedroom house,” he said. He did not ask. He did not suggest. He stated it as if he were commenting on the weather or the need to clean the gutters.
Beside me, my younger sister, Delaney, didn’t even look up from her phone. Her thumbs were flying across the screen, the backlight illuminating a face that was perfect, symmetrical, and entirely unbothered by the fact that our father was currently redistributing my property like a feudal lord.
“It is just logical, Stella,” my father continued, pouring himself another glass of the Cabernet I had purchased yesterday. “You are one person. You are thirty-four. You spend all your time at that clinic dealing with broken people. You come home, you sleep, you go back. What do you need five bedrooms for?”
I watched the wine swirl in his glass. I bought this house in Westbridge, just outside of Raleigh, three years ago. I bought it because I wanted roots. I wanted a place that was mine, a sanctuary where the hardwood floors didn’t creak with the weight of someone else’s expectations. I had invited them to stay temporarily when my father claimed his liquidity was tied up in investments and Delaney was between “conceptual phases” of her life. That was fourteen months ago.
“Delaney has a vision,” my father said, gesturing vaguely toward my sister. “She is building a brand, a legitimate enterprise.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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