Sinatra was crooning through my car speakers when I took the last turn up into Oakwood Hills. The road curved like a ribbon between manicured hedges, mailboxes with tasteful brass numbers, and stone walls that looked like they’d been there forever. My iced tea sweated in the cupholder.
The moving checklist on my passenger seat—printed, highlighted, painfully hopeful—rustled every time the AC kicked on. My fingers found the tiny American flag charm on my key ring without thinking. It was the kind of cheap little metal trinket you get at a Fourth of July street fair—red enamel chipped at one corner, a small star missing.
My mom had clipped it on years ago and said, “So you remember where you come from.” I’d never bothered to take it off. Now it tapped against my house key with a soft, stubborn click. “Jenny,” my mother said through my phone’s speaker, light as if she were asking what I wanted for dinner, “you’re single.
You don’t need a house this big. We’re family. Of course it should be shared, right?”
The words landed like an elbow in the ribs.
She knew perfectly well what day it was. She knew I was pulling up to the driveway of the home I’d bought in secret—just over one million dollars, my name and only my name on the deed, the reward I’d earned one muddy, sleepless year at a time. I should’ve been glowing.
Instead, I hit the brakes and stared. A moving truck I didn’t recognize sat in my driveway like it belonged there. And the men hustling back and forth weren’t carrying my boxes.
They were carrying hers. That’s when my checklist stopped feeling like a plan and started feeling like evidence. I didn’t come home to move in.
I came home to take my house back. The truck’s ramp thudded. A faded sectional sofa slid down it, fabric worn thin in the same spot my sister’s kids always jumped on.
A gold display cabinet—fake antique, too shiny, too loud—wobbled in the hands of two movers who looked like they wanted the job to end. “More to the right!” a voice barked from my terrace, sharp enough to cut glass. “Don’t scratch it.
This is my new office and home, you know.”
Steve. My brother-in-law. Self-proclaimed CEO.
The kind of man who always said “my” and “mine” like the universe had signed a contract with him. Through the living room’s floor-to-ceiling glass wall, I saw my sister Lucy herding her three kids as if my million-dollar living room was a daycare waiting area. The children sprinted across the hardwood floors I’d had custom finished two weeks earlier.
The story doesn’t end here –
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