and looked toward the storage room door.

My body went still before my mind caught up.

She noticed.

When she turned back, her expression had sharpened.

“There is something here,” she said softly.

I kept my face blank.

“Dad spent years sinking money into this dump,” she continued.

“More than made sense.

I assumed it was sentiment.

Then last night, after you left, I remembered something.

He used to come home with dirt on his cuffs and say he’d been doing electrical work.

Dad didn’t do electrical work.”

“Interesting memory.”

“And then I checked the tax documents.

There were equipment depreciation schedules that don’t match anything above ground.

So let’s stop wasting time.

What did you find?”

I almost laughed.

Not because it was funny.

Because the speed of her transformation was breathtaking.

Less than twelve hours earlier I was a loser dripping on her porch.

Now I was a gatekeeper.

“You threw my bag in the rain,” I said.

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“You locked me out in front of your guests.”

“And?”

The word landed like a slap.

There it was.

The center of her.

No remorse.

No shame.

Just impatience that pain might slow down a transaction.

She took a step closer.

“Listen to me, Ethan.

Whatever Dad hid here, he didn’t mean for you to squander it.

You’ve never managed money.

You’ve never run anything at this level.

If there’s value under this roof, we handle it together.

Quietly.

Before the town gets wind of it.”

“We?”

“Half.”

I stared at her.

She sighed, as if generosity exhausted her.

“Fine.

Forty percent.

But only if you stop being stubborn and let me bring in people who understand these things.”

“These things.”

“Assets.

Development.

Negotiation.

The adult world.”

She always knew where to cut.

Not with volume.

With implication.

I walked past her into the storage room, then stopped in the doorway without opening the hatch.

“Dad left you the mansion,” I said.

“He left me this.”

She crossed her arms.

“Dad made mistakes.”

“Did he?”

Her gaze flicked to the floorboards.

I saw the exact second greed overpowered caution.

“Open it,” she said.

“No.”

She smiled again, but it looked brittle now.

“Then I’ll go to court.

I’ll challenge the will, the transfers, the competency timeline.

I’ll tell everyone you came home unstable, paranoid, living in a condemned building and imagining hidden rooms under the floor.

Which story do you think this town will believe?”

For a moment, anger moved through me so fast it felt clean.

Then another memory surfaced—my father teaching me as a teenager how to negotiate with men who wanted too much for junk parts.

First one to show need loses.

I looked at my sister and saw nothing but need.

So I said, “You should leave.”

She stared.

“Excuse me?”

“Before I call the sheriff and explain that the woman who publicly threw me out of her house is now trespassing because she thinks I found something valuable.”

A pulse beat in her jaw.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” she said.

“Maybe.

But I know exactly what you’re doing.”

She stepped in close enough that I could smell her perfume over the oil and dust.

“You think Dad loved you more because he gave you some hidden toy? He didn’t.