My father forgot to hang up, and I heard him tell a relative, “She’s dead weight, and just foolish enough to let us stay in her house forever.” So I smiled, booked them a family vacation to Italy, quietly sold my $980,000 home and changed every lock and code when they rolled their suitcases up to “my” front door, every keypad they tried flashed the same message in return: access denied.
The moment my heart shattered wasn’t dramatic. There was no thunder, no ominous music, just the ordinary crunch of gravel under my tires as I pulled into the driveway of my ranch house outside Austin, exhausted from a ten-hour work marathon debugging a client’s interface. Then I saw it. Or rather, I saw where…
