Inside the box were documents. Not my documents, tossed in carelessly the way you’d pack a house in a hurry. These were arranged. On top sat a printout from a real estate listing site, and my stomach turned when I recognized the address. It was this house. My house. Listed as a “market value estimate,” with handwritten notes in the margin in Sabrina’s tidy script. Below it were photographs she’d taken of every room, staged and cleaned, the kind you take before you sell a property. And beneath those, a blank quitclaim deed form, printed and waiting, with sticky tabs marking the signature lines.

She had not redecorated a bedroom. She had been preparing to take the house. I dug deeper and found the worst page of all: a letter, half-drafted, addressed to an elder-care facility two towns over, inquiring about availability and monthly rates “for my mother-in-law, who can no longer safely live independently.” I was sixty-four years old, had just returned from hiking in the mountains for three weeks, and my son’s wife had been quietly building a case to declare me incapable and move me out. I heard her heels in the garage doorway behind me. “You weren’t supposed to open those,” Sabrina said, and this time there was no cheer in her voice at all.