I laughed.
“You’re impossible.”
Dad had been listening.
“What about new furniture?”
Derek turned.
“What?”
“Restoration is fine. But you should build new work too.”
Derek stared at him.
“You’d work here?”
Dad looked offended.
“I’m seventy-two, not dead.”
Mom called from outside.
“You are not working six days a week!”
Dad raised his voice.
“Four.”
“Three.”
He looked at us.
“Your mother has become unreasonable.”
We heard Mom laugh.
For the first time since I returned, the future entered the conversation.
Not the inheritance.
Not the past.
The future.
Over the next week, the house slowly became my parents’ home again.
Veronica found a small rental nearby.
It was modest, but she liked it because sunlight reached the kitchen.
Derek tried to refuse when Dad offered to help with the deposit.
Dad refused his refusal.
“This is help,” he told him. “Not control. Learn the difference.”
Derek accepted.
I stayed in Carmona longer than planned.
My office could tolerate remote work for a while.
More importantly, I did not want to leave before I understood what had actually happened to my family.
One evening, Veronica and I sat on the back steps.
She surprised me by bringing up the sentence I had heard through the window.
“We’re in charge now.”
“You heard that, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
She covered her face briefly.
“I was talking to my sister.”
“I assumed that.”
“I was angry.”
“At my parents?”
“At everybody.”
She looked toward the garden.
“My mother spent years caring for my grandmother. Nobody helped her. Then after Grandma died, everyone criticized every decision she had made.”
She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve.
