My father ordered security to throw my sixteen-year-old brother and me out of his country club. He was spending twenty-two thousand dollars on his stepdaughter's birthday. We were washing the plates.

The weeks following the court hearing were not filled with cinematic triumphs; they were filled with the slow, painful labor of dismantling a lie.

The mansion on Beverly Drive was emptied in seven days. Moving vans came and went, carrying away the velvet sofas, the French mirrors, and the two-thousand-dollar dining chairs. When the auction house finished cataloging the estate, the restitution fund established for Grandma Eleanor and the education trust for Owen and me totaled over four hundred thousand dollars.

Dad didn't buy another mansion.

Instead, he hired a crew of carpenters and painters and brought them to the single-story brick home on Mockingbird Lane—the house where he had grown up, the house where Mom had planted the hydrangeas along the front porch, the house he had abandoned because it held too many ghosts.

On a cold Saturday in November, the front door of Room 114 at Willow Glen opened for the last time.

Owen and I were there, carrying Grandma’s suitcases. But this time, we didn't walk toward the economy exit or the municipal transport van. We walked down the central corridor, past the nurses' station where Beverly stood with a wide, tearful smile, and out the front automatic doors into the autumn sunshine.

Waiting at the curb was Dad’s old Volvo wagon—the car he had kept in storage, the car Mom used to drive to soccer practice.

Dad stood by the open passenger door, holding a wool blanket.

"Where are we going, Reid?" Grandma Eleanor asked, her voice frail but steady as she leaned on her four-pronged cane.

"We’re going home, Mom," Dad said gently, helping her lower herself into the heated passenger seat and tucking the blanket around her legs. "Your garden needs weeding. The hydrangeas are out of control."

Eleanor looked up at him through her glasses. Her eyes were moist, but for the first time in four years, the tension had left her brow. "Did you fix the screen door on the back porch? You know how it bangs when the north wind blows."

"I fixed it yesterday, Mom," Dad said softly. "New latch. No more banging."

Paisley stood on the sidewalk a few paces back, wearing jeans and an old sweater, looking uncertain. Since the court hearing, she had been staying with Reid’s sister, working twenty hours a week at a local bookstore to pay her own gas money, trying desperately to figure out who she was when she wasn't "Paisley Mercer, Highland Park Debutante."

I walked over to her.

"Are you coming?" I asked.

Paisley blinked. "To the house? Willa, I... I don't belong there. That was your mother’s house."

"It’s Grandma’s house now," Owen said, walking up beside me with a cardboard box full of Eleanor’s crossword books. "And Grandma says anyone who can peel potatoes is required for Sunday dinner."

Paisley looked at Owen, then at me. Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them back, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and took the box from Owen’s arms.

"I can peel potatoes," Paisley whispered.