not be difficult, Cassie.

This is settled.

Eric and Shannon will be in that apartment on November first.’

I stood because remaining seated felt like surrender.

My legs had that hollow sensation bad news gives you, like your body is still a step behind your mind.

I picked up my coat, told him again to send the paperwork, and walked out while everyone watched me leave.

No one followed me to the door.

By the time I got to the driveway, my phone was buzzing.

Eric texted first, telling me not to drag lawyers into it.

Mom sent a message about Shannon needing peace.

Dad followed with three separate texts about maturity, sacrifice, and not making things uglier than they needed to be.

I drove straight to Westbrook and sat in my car outside the building for almost five minutes.

The brick glowed orange in the late-afternoon sun.

Mrs.

Alvarez’s curtains on the second floor were cracked open.

Someone upstairs was frying onions.

My father had just tried to reassign my life while standing in a room that smelled like pot roast, and the building itself looked completely untouched by the threat.

Upstairs, the apartment was exactly as I had left it.

My laptop dock on the desk in the second bedroom.

Grandpa’s old black-and-white photo of the building over the filing cabinet.

The plant on the kitchen sill that never fully recovered from winter.

Everything ordinary.

Everything mine.

That was what hurt first.

Not even the possible loss.

The assumption.

Dad had not asked.

Eric had not asked.

They had simply decided that because I was the daughter who managed well alone, my stability counted less than my brother’s inconvenience.

When my phone lit up again, it was the family group chat.

By then there were seventeen messages.

Eric was already talking like the apartment belonged to him, asking whether the second bedroom walls were still blue because Shannon wanted a softer color for the nursery.

Mom said I could keep a few boxes in my old room at the house if I could not find a place quickly.

Dad wrote, This does not need to get ugly.

Do the mature thing.

Then one more message arrived from a number I had not seen since the week of Grandpa’s funeral.

Cassie, this is Nina Patel.

Please call me before you answer your father.

I called her immediately.

Nina had handled legal work for Grandpa for years.

Her office sat above a dry cleaner two neighborhoods over and smelled like paper, dust, and peppermint tea.

When I got there the next morning, she already had a thick file open on her desk with 1247 WESTBROOK printed across the tab in neat black letters.

She did not waste time on sympathy.

She just slid a certified document across the desk and said, ‘Your grandfather expected something like this.’

I looked down and saw my own name on the deed.

Not a promise.

Not a note.

Not a trust amendment I might someday have to argue over.

A recorded deed transferring the entire building to me, signed by Grandpa eighteen months before he died and filed with the county three days later.

For a second I could not speak.

I just stared at the page and then back at Nina, waiting for