The messages were real but they were old. Two years earlier, before any of this, I had texted Margot a photo of the listing when I was still just dreaming about it, and I had written “Imagine if I bought this, you could all come anytime.” She had screenshotted it, kept it, and flew to the Bahamas with it like a contract. She had cropped out the word imagine.

I stood at my own gate and I made a decision I still think about. I let them in. Not because the screenshot held up legally, it did not, but because Margot’s two children were standing in the heat with their suitcases and they had nothing to do with a decade of keychains and exclusion, and I was not going to send a nine-year-old away from a beach in the name of a point I had already made on the phone.

I gave them three days. I was polite. I ate dinner with them one evening and said very little. Darren, to his credit, spent most of the visit looking uncomfortable, and on the second night he apologized to me quietly by the water, unprompted, for things Margot had said over the years. I accepted it because it was honest. Margot and I did not fight. We were careful and distant, which is its own kind of conclusion.

When they left, she hugged me at the gate. I let her. She said she hoped this wasn’t the end of us. I said I hoped so too, which was true, and which was also not a promise. We have not spoken since, which is the same silence we had for ten years, except now I am the one standing somewhere beautiful, and I am the one who decided the terms.