My phone lit up with Mom’s name exactly five hours after that call. I let it ring four times before answering. “What did you do?” she screamed, her voice cracking. “The realtor just told us the bungalow is off the table!” I told her calmly that the house had never been legally theirs. She went silent, then whispered something that turned my blood cold. “Your father already sold our house, and we have nowhere to go on Saturday.”

Behind her, I heard Dad shouting and something shatter against a wall. “Listen to me,” Mom said, barely breathing. “There is something about that house you don’t know, and if you walk away, we lose everything.” Then a stranger’s voice took the phone and said my full name slowly, as if he had been waiting a long time to say it.