“A bunch of weeds that attracted bees and took up valuable space,” Dad interrupted, taking a long drink of his tea. “Your aunt had no sense of modern landscaping. This is a ranch property, Skyler. It should look refined, not like some overgrown cottage in the countryside.”
“Those roses were heritage plants.” My hands were shaking. “Some of them were over fifty years old. Aunt Alice—”
“—is dead,” Mom said flatly. “And she left you the house, not her garden hobby. Frankly, I think she would be pleased to see the property being managed by people with actual taste.”
The workers were already unrolling the turf. One of them glanced at me, saw my face, and quickly looked away. They’d been paid to do a job. They didn’t care that they had just bulldozed my last tangible connection to the only family member who had ever actually loved me.
“You had no right.” My voice cracked. “This is my house. You had no right to—”
“No right?” Dad’s face darkened. He took a step toward me, and I instinctively took a step back.
“I am your father. I’ve been living under this roof for two years, paying my dues, putting up with your rules and your attitude. I have every right to make improvements that benefit the household. Or did you forget that you invited us to live here?”
That was the spin, wasn’t it? I had invited them.
The truth was messier, and it sat in my stomach like a stone. Two years ago, my parents had declared bankruptcy. Dad’s “investment opportunities,” which I had learned meant gambling on penny stocks and lending money to his equally broke friends, had finally caught up with them. They’d lost their house in the foreclosure.
Mom had called me crying, saying they were going to be homeless, that Dad’s knee was too bad for him to work anymore, that they just needed somewhere to stay for… maybe three months. Tops. While they “figured things out.”
And I, like an idiot, had said yes.
Aunt Alice had died eight months before that, leaving me her custom brick ranch house on three acres of Texas hill country. The property was worth over a million dollars, a ridiculous windfall for a twenty-eight-year-old UX designer who had been living in a cramped apartment in downtown Austin. The property taxes alone were $25,000 a year, but I had been managing. Remote work paid well, and I had been careful.
When my parents asked to stay temporarily, I convinced myself it was the right thing to do—filial duty, family obligation, all those things that had been drilled into me since childhood.
Three months became six. Six became a year. Now it was two years, and they had completely taken over.
They had moved into the master wing—the entire east side of the house, with its spa bathroom and private patio—claiming Dad’s bad knee meant he couldn’t handle stairs. Never mind that my home office was upstairs and I had to climb those stairs a dozen times a day. Never mind that I’d watched Dad take those same stairs just fine when he wanted to raid the storage closet for my aunt’s vintage bourbon.
They contributed exactly zero dollars to household expenses. No groceries, no utilities, no property tax. When I’d tried to bring it up delicately, Mom had cried and said I was punishing them for being poor, and Dad had gone silent and cold for three days until I apologized.
They treated the house like it was theirs. They threw parties. They rearranged furniture. They criticized my decorating choices, my cooking, the friends I invited over.
And I had let them. Because I was weak. Because I didn’t know how to say no. Because some broken part of me still believed that if I was just good enough, patient enough, generous enough, they might finally act like parents, instead of parasites.
But this—this was different…
