“Mom, let us in.”
“No.”
He blinked.
It was such a small word.
He had apparently never prepared for it.
“We live here.”
“You stayed here,” I said. “You treated that as ownership. It was not.”
“You cannot just lock us out because you’re mad.”
“I am not doing this because I am mad. I am doing it because you emptied my house while I slept, sold property that was not yours, left me without appliances, and used the money for a vacation. I have spent fifteen days making sure I understand exactly what happened before I speak to you.”
Brittany stared at the folder.
“What is the storage key for?”
“Some of the things I recovered.”
Ryan’s expression changed.
“Recovered?”
“I called the consignment shop first. Then the estate dealer whose number I found on the receipt you left in the trash. Then the man who bought the piano. Then two marketplace buyers. Then an auction house. I did not get everything back. But I got enough to learn exactly what you did.”
He looked genuinely stunned.
That angered me more than denial would have.
He had expected me to cry.
He had not expected me to investigate.
“You went through our trash?” Brittany asked.
I almost laughed.
“You sold my refrigerator.”
She looked away.
Ryan lowered his voice.
“Mom, we were going to replace stuff.”
“With what?”
“New things. Better things.”
“You cannot replace my wedding crystal with better crystal. You cannot replace your father’s shirts with better shirts. You cannot replace letters from dead people with newer letters.”
His face tightened at the mention of Tom.
“Dad would not want you doing this to us.”
