I let the silence stretch, and then I smiled, which was not the reaction any of them had rehearsed for. “Then all of you need to leave,” I said. Roman blinked. His mother’s sympathetic tilt froze halfway. “Excuse me?” Roman said. “This is my house.” I reached into my bag and set a single folder on the stone countertop I had paid for. “It’s not, actually,” I said. “It never was. And before you say another word, you should all look at what’s inside.”

They did not move, so I opened it myself. The deed. The renovation contracts. The loan payoff records. And every one of them listed the same name as the sole legal owner and payer. Mine. Roman’s face began to change the way it had the day I told him the debt was gone, except this time the excitement drained out instead of in. Because what he never understood, in all his careful playing, was that a woman who works where I work does not hand a cheating husband her assets. She protects them, quietly, while he thinks he’s winning.