For several seconds, she simply stared at the carpet.
Then she spoke.
“I thought your mother was going to give us the house.”
Ethan frowned.
“She never promised that.”
“You said she wanted us to have a home.”
“She did.”
“You said Willow Point might become ours someday.”
“I said she was thinking about what to do with it.”
Vanessa gave a bitter laugh.
“Do you hear the difference? You grew up with that house. You could spend summers there and forget about it for the rest of the year. To me, that kind of property is life-changing.”
Ethan looked confused.
“It is life-changing. Mom just told us we can live there.”
“That isn’t the same as owning something.”
“No,” I said quietly. “It isn’t.”
Vanessa turned toward me.
“You’ve never had to worry about losing your home, have you?”
I studied her.
“I’ve worried about losing plenty of things.”
“But not recently.”
She had a point.
I was financially comfortable now.
She knew that.
What she didn’t know was how close my husband and I had come to losing our first business when Ethan was small, or how many nights I’d spent working out which bills could wait until the next customer paid.
But I wasn’t going to turn our conversation into a competition over who had suffered more.
“Tell Ethan why you wanted to sell Willow Point,” I said.
Vanessa looked away.
“I didn’t say I definitely wanted to sell it.”
“You said you were asking about possibilities,” Ethan replied. “What possibilities?”
She pulled a tissue from her handbag.
