At 5:06 a.m., my sister walked into the house I bo…

“No, I do not need another week. I need the bridge extension you promised. And I’m not losing Riverton over a technicality.”

Riverton, I knew, was a development project he had been boasting about for months.

Boutique retail. Luxury condos. Boutique anything was Jonathan’s religion.

He had been talking about investors, zoning, and “closing sequence” since Thanksgiving. Christina had repeated those words without understanding any of them and started speaking of future vacations the way some people talk about weather: not as something hoped for, but as something owed. I set the kettle down without making a sound.

When Jonathan came back inside, he smiled at me like I was already yesterday. I smiled back like I had heard nothing. By that evening, Lena had called twice, emailed five times, and come up with a plan so clean it made my pulse slow down.