The address led me twenty minutes inland, away from the ocean, to a cramped apartment complex with a cracked parking lot and a broken security gate propped open with a cinderblock. When Sebastian opened the door, my heart broke. He was thinner than the last time I’d seen him, dark circles under his eyes, and behind him I could see a mattress on the floor and a single lamp. This was not the life I had bought a six-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar beach house to give him. “Mom,” he said, and then he started to cry, the way he hadn’t since he was small. I dropped the cookies and the gift bag and just held him in that doorway while he shook.

The story came out slowly, over instant coffee at a wobbly card table. A month into the semester, Bianca, my ex-husband’s sister, had shown up at the beach house “just to visit for a few days” with her two boys. Then Grant’s parents, Judith and Harold, came too. Within two weeks, they had simply taken over. They filled the closets, claimed the bedrooms, told Sebastian the house was “family property” and that he was being selfish keeping it to himself. And when Sebastian called his father for help, Grant had sided with them, telling his eighteen-year-old son to “stop being dramatic” and let the family use the house. Outnumbered and worn down, Sebastian had quietly packed a bag and left rather than fight all of them alone. He hadn’t told me because, he said, he didn’t want me to feel like the money I’d spent to protect him had been wasted.