My chest tightened. “What?”
She swallowed hard. “He said this house belongs to him now. He said I should leave before you got home because I’ve been ‘living off his future’ long enough.”
For a moment, I could not breathe.
Ethan was our only son. Thirty-two years old. Married to Ashley, a woman who had never once offered to wash a dish in this house but always talked about what “we” should renovate after Linda and I were gone.
I walked to the keypad and entered the old code.
Denied.
I entered it again.
Denied.
Linda’s eyes filled with tears. “He told me not to make a scene.”
I gently took her grocery bag, then held out my hand.
“Come with me.”
She looked frightened. “Tom, don’t fight him.”
“I’m not going to fight him,” I said. “I’m going to remind him.”
We walked to the side entrance near the garage. Ethan had forgotten one thing: I had built this house long before smart locks and security apps. I opened the old manual lock with the spare key hidden inside my work boot in the shed.
