I did not slam a single drawer while I packed. I folded my shirts the way Eleanor had taught me, set my medications in the side pocket, and zipped the suitcase closed while the basketball game still blared down the hall. When I walked back through the living room, Trevor was already lifting his empty bottle toward me, expecting the beer. I set my house key on the coffee table beside his boots instead. Vanessa’s smile faltered for the first time. “Dad, don’t be dramatic,” she said. I told her I was not being dramatic. I was being finished.

Then I drove to the one place neither of them expected me to go. Not a motel, not a friend’s spare room, but the office of a real estate attorney named Gordon Blake, a man I had trusted for twenty years. Because there was one detail Trevor never bothered to learn before he told me it was his house. The deed had never left my name. And I had scheduled that meeting three days earlier.