“James. All of you. Off my boat. Now.”
My mother stepped out of the hallway, drying her hands with one of my private towels.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “We’re family. There’s plenty of room.”
“This is a business vessel,” I said evenly. “You are trespassing. If you’re not gone in five minutes, I’m calling the harbor authority.”
“And what exactly will you tell them?” my father asked from behind me. He crossed to the bar and poured himself more of my scotch as if he owned the place. “That you’re throwing your elderly parents onto the dock after everything we did for you?”
He stepped closer, crowding my space the way he always had.
“We raised you,” he said. “Fed you. Put a roof over your head. You think all this success is just yours? It belongs to the family. We invested in you. When one child succeeds, the family benefits. That’s how it works. Now we need something back.”
There it was—the truth of how they had always seen me.
Not as a daughter.
As an asset.
A long-term investment finally paying dividends.
“You didn’t invest in me,” I said. “You survived me, and I survived you. That’s all.”
“We’re not here to fight,” he said.
“No,” I replied. “You’re here to collect.”
James finally looked up from his phone. “I gave up my lease,” he said casually. “We moved out this morning.”
“The lender is getting aggressive,” my mother added, with the tone of someone describing a minor inconvenience. “James is in real trouble.”
She looked at me the way she always did when a conversation turned toward what she expected from me.
“How much?” I asked.
My father swirled the scotch in his glass.
“One hundred forty-eight thousand dollars.”
The number hung in the room.
