“No. This way is better. I get what Grandma wanted me to have, and you get to live with what you’ve done. Consider it a Christmas gift.”
They left without another word, the front door slamming hard enough to rattle the picture frames on the wall.
Dad and I sat in silence for a long moment, the turkey getting cold between us.
“I’m sorry,”
he finally said, his voice cracking.
“I should have paid more attention. Should have protected you better.”
“This isn’t your fault.”
I reached across the table, squeezing his hand.
“You’re a good man stuck in a bad situation. You always have been.”
He looked at me with watery eyes.
“What happens now?”
“Now I move into the house I bought. You’re welcome to visit anytime. I’m thinking of turning Grandma’s sewing room into a proper design studio.”
I paused, choosing my next words carefully.
“And if you ever decide you want to leave Mom, you’ll have a place to go. No questions asked.”
Dad nodded slowly, processing this information like he was learning a foreign language. The concept of leaving probably felt as alien to him as flying to Mars.
We finished dinner in relative peace, though neither of us had much appetite. I helped him clean up, washing dishes in the same sink where Mom had once told me my art degree was equivalent to flushing money down the drain, where Victoria had announced her engagement to a hedge fund manager while simultaneously reminding everyone I was still single at twenty-nine.
The drive home to my apartment felt longer than usual, streetlights blurring through the light snow that had started to fall. My phone buzzed constantly with texts from Victoria, each one more threatening than the last.
“Just block her, Janet,”
Dad had said earlier, and I finally took his advice. I blocked her number after the fifth message about lawyers and fraud charges. Mom called twice. I let both go to voicemail. Aunt Paula was the only one I answered.
“I heard there was some excitement at dinner.”
Her voice was carefully neutral.
“You could say that. Your mother called me absolutely hysterical. Something about you stealing Dorothy’s house through criminal means.”
Paula’s tone suggested she didn’t believe a word of it.
“I bought it fair and square. They put it on the market. I made an offer. They accepted. All very legal and aboveboard.”
Paula laughed, a sound like wind chimes in a storm.
“Dorothy would be so proud of you. She always said you had more spine than the rest of them combined.”
My throat tightened.
“I found the letter you sent me. The one with Mr. Hammond’s contact information.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,”
Paula said, still laughing.
“I’m a terrible record keeper. Things just fall out of my files all the time.”
She’d known. Maybe not everything, but enough. Enough to point me in the right direction, to give me the tools I needed without directly interfering.
“Thank you,”
I whispered.
“For what? I didn’t do anything except be a forgetful old woman.”
She paused.
“But if I had done something, it would only be because Dorothy deserved better than what happened. And so did you.”
We talked for another hour, Paula sharing stories about Grandma that I’d never heard: how Dorothy had been a suffragette in her youth, how she’d scandalized the family by refusing three marriage proposals before finally accepting Grandpa’s offer on her own terms, how she’d built a successful catering business in the 1960s when women weren’t supposed to have careers.
The house had been her crown jewel, purchased with her own money in 1965. Every Victorian detail had been chosen carefully, every piece of gingerbread trim a statement of independence. She’d raised my mother in that house, taught her that women could be anything they wanted. Somewhere along the way, Mom had twisted that lesson into believing she could take anything she wanted, consequences be damned.
I spent Christmas night in my apartment, but I didn’t feel alone. I pulled out the boxes of things I’d taken from Grandma’s house during the estate sale, items Mom and Victoria had considered worthless: costume jewelry, old photographs, recipe cards written in Grandma’s spidery handwriting. There was a journal I’d never opened, bound in cracked leather with pages yellowed by time.
I cracked it open carefully, and Grandma’s voice flowed from the pages as clearly as if she were sitting next to me.
“March 15th, 2019. Updated my will today. Everything goes to Paula and Eleanor to split except the house. The house goes to my granddaughter, the one who sees it as a home instead of an investment. The one who still visits even when she doesn’t have to, who helps me in the garden and listens to my old stories. She has her grandmother’s spirit, and she’ll know what to do with it.”
I closed the journal, tears streaming down my face. She’d known. Even before the cameras, before the theft, she’d known what kind of people her daughter and eldest granddaughter had become.
The next few weeks passed in a blur of paperwork and planning. I hired a local contractor named Jake Martinez, who’d grown up three houses down from Grandma’s place. He remembered her lemonade and her stories about the house’s history.
“Your grandmother used to tell me this place had good bones,”
