Chapter 1 - The Ultimatum
“Give Chloe your bedroom by morning,” my stepmother said, “or get out of this house.”
My father kept eating.
That was the part I would remember. Not Gwendolyn’s voice, sharp enough to stop every conversation at the dinner table. Not the little smile on Chloe’s face. My father’s fork, moving through his mashed potatoes while his wife told me to leave the home where I’d grown up.
I was twenty-five. Chloe was eighteen. She wanted my bedroom because its tall windows gave her better light for her videos.
“You’re barely here,” Chloe said. “And you can work in the basement.”
“The basement is my office.”
Gwendolyn set down her glass. “You can work anywhere, Paige.”
“So can Chloe.”
Her chair scraped backward. “I am tired of that attitude.”
Dad finally spoke. “Paige, let her have the room for a few months. Keep the peace.”
I looked at him. “Tell her I live here too.”
He glanced at me, then down at his plate.
For nine years, keep the peace had meant letting Gwendolyn give away my mother’s Christmas dishes. It meant paying to replace clothes Chloe borrowed and ruined. It meant smiling when relatives told me I should be grateful Gwendolyn had made room for me in my own home.
I could have argued. I could have told them what Dad knew about that house.
Instead, I folded my napkin.
“Okay.”
Gwendolyn blinked. “Okay?”
“I’ll leave tonight.”
I went upstairs, pulled two suitcases from my closet, and packed my clothes, laptop, documents, and my mother’s jewelry. From behind a stack of blankets, I took a cedar box she had given me before she died.
Chloe laughed when she saw me cross the living room with my bags. Gwendolyn didn’t say anything.
Dad was sitting on the porch.
“Paige,” he said as I loaded my trunk. “Don’t make this dramatic.”
“I’m doing what she asked.”
I drove away without telling them where I was going.
Forty minutes later, a steel gate opened onto my driveway in Paradise Valley. Lights came on across the hillside house I had bought six months earlier. I had planned to tell Dad about it when he finally asked me something about my life and listened to the answer.
Inside, I set the cedar box on the kitchen island. Beneath my mother’s photograph lay a copy of the trust agreement she had made before she died.
I opened it to the page with Dad’s signature.
My mother had left me half of our Phoenix house. Dad had agreed to manage my share until I turned twenty-one.
I had turned twenty-one four years ago.
May you like
Then I saw a recent property-tax notice I’d tucked beneath the agreement. Someone had applied to change the mailing address for notices about my half of the house.
And the request carried my name.
