Sometimes she still remembered that first sentence like a door slamming through the phone: My stepmother called and said, “I sold your house to teach you respect.”
But the lesson had not been Rebecca’s to teach.
To Rebecca, the house was leverage. To my father, it had been a life.
And because he had understood that before anyone else did, the home remained exactly what he meant it to be: not a prize, not a project, and never a sale.
