“Then why would Mom say that?”
It was the first real question Lily had asked. Alexandra opened her eyes and looked down at Evelyn’s signature.
“That’s something you should ask her,” Alexandra said.
Lily’s breath caught. Then the armor snapped back into place.
“You deserve to be banned,” Lily said. “You’ve never really been part of this family anyway.” Then she hung up.
Alexandra kept the phone against her ear for another moment after the line went dead. You’ve never really been part of this family anyway. It should have hurt less by now, given how many versions of that sentence she had heard since she was a teenager. But some lies hurt precisely because they are repeated in rooms where love should have lived.
Her father called ten minutes later.
James Parker had always been bad at calling at the right time and worse at saying the right thing once he did.
When Alexandra was a child, this had been endearing. He forgot to buy milk but remembered every detail of the sandcastle tournament she staged at age eight. He missed parent-teacher night once because of work and arrived home devastated, carrying a bouquet of grocery-store daisies and a handwritten apology.
He was not a careless man then. Not exactly. He was distracted, sometimes weak, but warm. After Evelyn died, warmth drained from him in stages. Victoria filled the empty spaces.
“Alexandra,” he said when she answered, using her full name in the tired way that meant he had already been persuaded she was unreasonable. “Please don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
Alexandra sat in the desk chair and looked at the wall. “Harder for whom?” she asked.
He sighed. “For everyone.”
“Victoria changed the locks on Mom’s beach house and told me I’m banned. Did you know that?”
“She said she had to set boundaries.”
“Boundaries?”
“You know how things have been.”
“No, Dad. I don’t. Why don’t you explain how things have been?”
On the other end, he was silent. Alexandra could picture him in the den of the suburban house outside Hartford that Victoria had turned into something glossy and impersonal. He would be sitting in the leather chair near the fireplace, rubbing his forehead, a glass of Scotch untouched beside him because he liked the idea of drinking more than the habit itself.
“Victoria feels you’ve been hostile,” he said eventually. “Especially about Lily. The graduation weekend upset everyone.”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“She said you declined.”
“She lied.”
“Alex—”
“She lied,” Alexandra repeated, still calm. “And you believed her because it was easier.”
That landed. She heard it in the way he inhaled.
“Your stepmother has done a great deal to keep this family together,” he said, but it lacked force, as though he were reading from notes someone else had written.
“Has she?”
“She’s tried.”
“To erase Mom from the beach house? To remove her roses? To have me treated as a trespasser at a property she doesn’t own?”
“She told me you didn’t care about the property anymore.”
Alexandra stared at the trust documents, then at the framed photo on her desk of Evelyn at the beach, wind in her hair, one hand raised to block the sun.
“I have paid the taxes through the trust every year since Mom died,” Alexandra said. “I coordinated the roof repair two summers ago. I replaced the damaged porch supports after the winter storm. I hired the contractor who fixed the east-side windows. I send Margaret the annual maintenance records. Did you ask me, or did you just let Victoria tell you who I was?”
Her father said nothing.
“Did you read what you signed?” Alexandra asked.
Another silence.
“Victoria said it was just a formality,” he said finally, quietly. “She said the beach house was still tangled up in old paperwork and that since you were busy, we should simplify things.”
“Simplify things,” Alexandra repeated.
“I thought—”
“You thought what?”
“I thought she knew what she was doing.”
Alexandra closed the folder slowly. “She did,” she said.
He swallowed audibly. “Alexandra, maybe you can just stay away for a little while. Let everyone cool down. We can work this out later.”
For a second, she almost envied his ability to believe that later was a place where consequences dissolved.
“No,” she said.
He sounded startled. “No?”
“No. I am not staying away from my mother’s house because Victoria wants to pretend stealing is a paperwork issue.”
“That’s a serious accusation.”
“It’s a serious situation.”
“She’s my wife.”
“She’s not the owner.”
He sounded older when he spoke again. “What are you going to do?”
Alexandra looked toward the window. The sunset was gone. The city was all black glass and scattered light.
“I’m going home,” she said.
After they hung up, Alexandra booked the first morning flight she could find to Logan’s smallest coastal connection, then canceled it and decided to drive. The house was only a few hours away, and she wanted the documents beside her, not under an airplane seat.
She reserved a rental car for dawn, printed copies of the trust, packed the original envelope in a waterproof document sleeve, and carried her suitcase out from the bedroom closet.
She packed like someone preparing for both a homecoming and a legal proceeding: Jeans. Sweaters. Boots.
The navy hoodie her mother had once stolen from her and claimed was more flattering on a woman with “mature authority.”
A black blazer in case she needed to look like the kind of person officers and lawyers could not dismiss.
The framed photograph of Evelyn and Alexandra on the beach when Alexandra was seven, both of them sunburned and laughing. A small wooden box containing shells collected over twenty summers. Her laptop. Chargers. A notebook.
At midnight, as she zipped the suitcase shut, her phone buzzed again. Victoria:
I’m having Evelyn’s roses removed tomorrow. They’re diseased and ugly. Time this family stopped worshiping ghosts.
For the first time all evening, Alexandra felt the impact physically. Her chest tightened as if someone had reached inside and closed a fist.
The roses. Evelyn’s roses lined the front path in a ragged, stubborn, glorious spill of red and pink and cream. Evelyn had called them “dramatic old ladies” because they demanded attention and hated being moved. She had planted some from cuttings her own mother had given her.
When Alexandra was little, she thought every house must have roses that smelled of salt and summer and her mother’s hands. Victoria knew exactly what those roses meant.
Alexandra did not reply. She took a screenshot, forwarded it to Margaret, and wrote one sentence: I’m leaving at first light.
Margaret responded almost immediately: Good. Officer Martinez in Hawthorne Point has copies of everything. I spoke with him directly. I’ll be available all day.
Then, a second message: Bring gloves if you plan to save the roses.