My stepmother called at 11:47 p.m. on the first night in the beach house I bought with my own money and told me she and my father were moving in the next day, that they were taking the master suite, that her daughter would get the best ocean-view room

Adrien had been my attorney for seven years, though “attorney” doesn’t fully cover what he had become in my life. He handled acquisitions, entity formation, contracts, and the occasional emergency when wealthy people behaved like unsupervised children in expensive shoes. He was forty-two, sharp, impossible to rush, and built like a man who had once rowed crew at an elite college and never quite abandoned the posture. If he had one flaw, it was that he enjoyed being right in ways most people would find unsporting. Fortunately, rightness is a useful trait in counsel.

“My stepmother moved into my beach house this morning,” I said, “reassigned my bedroom, and brought her daughter’s skincare refrigerator.”

There was a pause.

Then: “I’m going to need that repeated at a speed my legal education can process.”

I repeated it.

When I finished, Adrien let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a curse. “Are you safe?”

“Yes.”

“Are they legal occupants?”

“No.”

“Good. Then why do I feel there’s a second call coming hidden inside this first call?”

Because months earlier, after my father’s heart scare, I had asked Adrien to quietly review a transfer deed tied to my father’s Del Mar property.

At the time, the reason had seemed vague even to me. My father had mentioned in passing that Vanessa was “simplifying some things.” Then a county notice misdelivered to my old San Diego condo caught my eye because the signature line on a scanned copy, which my father forwarded absentmindedly while asking whether I knew why county notices looked different now, didn’t sit right. It looked like his name written by someone trying too hard not to imitate his own. Adrien had glanced at it and said, “Maybe nothing, maybe very much something, but without context we’d be burning money to speculate.”

Now there was context.

“I want the Del Mar deed file,” I said. “The full pull. The one you warned me about.”

Adrien’s tone changed immediately. “What happened?”

“She lied to my father about this house. He thought he was visiting. She thought she was moving in. If she’s been running different stories in my direction and his, I want every piece of paper she’s touched since his cardiac rehab.”