“That house was our inheritance. It was the only thing you were going to leave us.”
“That house was mine, Faith. Mine—not yours, not Grant’s. Mine.”
The words came out firmer than I had planned.
Audrey finally stopped talking and looked at all of us, confusion plain on her face. You could feel the eyes of the nearby tables discreetly turning toward us.
“And may I ask where you plan to live now?”
Faith’s question dripped with sarcasm.
“Or did you sell your future, too?”
“I have a new apartment. Smaller. More comfortable. Easier to maintain. In a secure building with twenty-four-hour security. I already moved in two weeks ago, and the money from the sale—it’s in an investment account, well protected, generating interest that will allow me to live with dignity for the rest of my days.”
Faith stood up so abruptly that her chair scraped against the hardwood floor. Grant tried to stop her by placing a hand on her arm, but she shook him off with a harsh movement.
“Do you know what you just did? Do you have any idea how you’ve betrayed us?”
The irony of her words would have been comical if it weren’t so pathetic. There she was, accusing me of betrayal when, just fifty minutes earlier, she had sent her husband to steal my home.
“I didn’t betray anyone, Faith. I protected what was mine.”
To understand how I got to that moment—sitting in a restaurant watching my own daughter fall apart in front of me—I need to go back forty-two years, to when I was twenty-eight and had just been widowed with a three-year-old girl in my arms.
Robert died in a construction accident: a poorly secured beam, a five-second lapse, and my entire world collapsed. He left me with nothing but debt and rent that was due in two weeks. The company’s insurance took months to process, and when it finally arrived, it barely covered the funeral and the medical expenses we had accumulated during his agony in the hospital.
