My stepmother moved into the $5.6 million beach ho…

He is seventy-one years old, tall in the sloping way certain men become tall when age takes the military straightness out of their backs but not the habit of standing like responsibility still belongs to them. He made his money in commercial real estate, not spectacularly but steadily, and after my mother died he developed the polished distracted air of a man who could handle any business problem and had no idea what to do with a dinner table. He was not cruel when I was young.

He was absent in the way ambitious men often are—physically present enough to claim fatherhood, emotionally elsewhere enough that mothering became a thing women around them absorbed by default. I loved him anyway. Children do.

Then my mother died, and two years later he married Vanessa, and the house I grew up in began to change room by room without anyone ever announcing that change was the plan. “Were you asleep?” I asked. “No.” I heard papers rustling.

“Just reading. Why?”

“Vanessa called. She said you and she are moving into my house tomorrow.