“Ask them to leave,” Eleanor said. “This is not your house.”
The man with his feet on the coffee table brought them down to the floor. Someone in the kitchen turned the music down. A woman near the window looked at her phone with the focused attention of someone deciding whether to be somewhere else.
Megan’s smile thinned to something less comfortable.
“Oh, come on. Don’t make this into something it isn’t. It’s one weekend, and honestly—”
She paused. And then she shrugged, and the shrug was everything, the culmination of the word wasteful and the questions about bedrooms and the listings for rental companies and the conversation about renovations that Eleanor had apparently not been meant to overhear but had.
“It’s a bit selfish, don’t you think? Holding onto all this space when you hardly use it.”
There it was. Clear as a window wiped clean.
Eleanor felt the last of her hesitation detach and dissolve.
“I said,” she replied, “ask them to leave.”
Megan crossed her arms.
“Or what? You’ll throw out your own family? After everything Robert does for you?”
Eleanor held her gaze.
“My son does not do anything for me that I have not already arranged and paid for myself.”
“That’s not how it looks,” Megan said, her voice sharpening. “From where I’m standing, you’re sitting on a property you barely use while people who could actually enjoy it go without. That’s not generosity. That’s—”
She stopped herself for one brief second. Then let the word come anyway.
The word that changed everything
“It’s leech behavior, honestly.” Something about the word clarified the room the way a very cold glass of water clarifies the early morning. Not because it shocked Eleanor, because she had felt it coming for months. But because saying it aloud had stripped away the last of the plausible ambiguity.
She looked at Megan. Not with fury. With the particular steadiness of a woman who has made a decision.
“Get out,” she said.
This time there was no ambient noise to absorb it.
She stepped further into the room, her posture straight, her hands at her sides, her voice carrying the quality of someone who has given one warning and considers that sufficient.
“Every person in this house who does not have my permission to be here will leave now. If you need more encouragement than that, I will call the police and provide it.”