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.

The door to the pantry stood open, and I saw immediately that the top shelf had been reorganized by someone who did not understand sentiment and therefore did not recognize it when it was right in front of them. My mother’s glass jars of hand-labeled dried herbs, preserved for no practical reason after she died because none of us were ever going to cook with ten-year-old rosemary, had vanished. I had left them there on purpose, absurd and brittle and precious, because sometimes grief needs objects.

I put a hand on the pantry frame to steady myself.

Evelyn’s voice came from behind me. “Rebecca?”

“I’m fine.”

It wasn’t true, but it was close enough for public purposes.

There were more losses upstairs. My mother’s bedroom—later called the guest room by Diana, as if changing the name changed the dead—had been turned into some kind of “primary suite sitting room,” according to a brochure from a local furniture store lying on the dresser. The quilt my grandmother stitched by hand when my parents married was gone. So was the reading chair by the window, the one where my mother used to sit in a white cotton nightgown with her coffee while the sky lightened over the water.

I checked closets. Cabinets. The attic access panel. Every drawer in every room.

By the time I got to my old bedroom—still small, still facing east, still painted the faded pale green I had chosen when I was fourteen because I thought it looked like sea glass—I was shaking hard enough that I had to sit on the edge of the bed.

At least the bed was still mine. Narrow iron frame. Worn pine nightstand. A shelf lined with the ridiculous carved wooden gulls my father used to buy from roadside stands before Diana entered our lives and made him allergic to anything unsophisticated.

One of the gulls was missing its beak. I stared at it for a long moment, then realized the break was old. I had broken it myself at fifteen while trying to dust and balance an open paperback on my knee. My mother had laughed and said, “Perfect. Now it has character.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

This was what Diana never understood. She thought value existed where money had touched it most recently. She could not imagine a house being defended for reasons that had nothing to do with sale price or prestige or the chance to stage a better Christmas card. She didn’t know what to do with memory except bulldoze it and call the result an upgrade.