My stepmother called just as the day was folding into evening, her voice dripping with a satisfaction so sharp I could almost see the smile stretching across her face. She told me, with deliberate precision, that I would never set foot in the family beach house again—that every lock had already been changed.

Diana did not give up quickly. People like her rarely do. There were angry letters through counsel. Accusations about “assets improved during marital use.” Complaints about jewelry missing from a drawer I had never seen. One particularly deranged suggestion that my mother’s letter had been emotionally manipulative and therefore should be given reduced weight. Evelyn responded to each with the legal equivalent of a raised eyebrow and a blade.

Meanwhile, I kept going back and forth between Boston and the beach house, spending long weekends there sorting, cleaning, cataloging, and slowly restoring the place not to some impossible museum version of itself but to something honest.

I repainted the living room walls cream.

I rehung the watercolors.

I reinstalled the pot rack.

I washed every window until the light came in warm again.

I found the missing herb jars in a basement cabinet behind an unopened fondue set Diana had apparently received as a hostess gift and never used because melted cheese, unlike social performance, leaves evidence. I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the basement stairs.

I found the shell lamp and put it back in my room.

I unpacked the Christmas ornaments in March just to make sure they were all right, then sat on the floor in the living room surrounded by tissue paper and memory while sea light moved over the wood floors.

At some point in April, my landlord in Boston called to ask whether I planned to renew my lease in June.

I looked out from my apartment window at brick, traffic, and the narrow strip of sky visible between buildings. Then I thought of the beach house kitchen at sunrise. The porch in rain. The way the ocean filled the night. The way my body had begun unknotting there in places I had stopped noticing were tight.

“I’m not renewing,” I said.

The decision startled everyone except me.

My coworkers acted as though I had announced a pilgrimage to another century. My friend Tasha, who had heard every bad Diana story for eight years and therefore required less explanation, said only, “About time one of those people lost.”

I started negotiating remote work three days later.

By May I was living at the beach house full-time.