My stepmother moved into the $5.6 million beach ho…

Then perhaps you should.”

Her confidence did something interesting to me in that moment. It didn’t scare me. It didn’t even anger me in the ordinary hot way.

Instead it created a sharp clean quiet in my head. Because if she was this sure, this immediate, this practiced in the seizure of someone else’s space, then she was not improvising. This was not a random overstep.

It was a system. And systems can be observed. “I’d like to speak to my father,” I said.

“He’s asleep.”

The answer came too fast. “At eleven forty-seven?”

“He’s tired, Bianca.”

There it was. The first mismatch.