They came back on a Thursday to a house they could not enter. The locks had been changed on Tuesday morning, legally, because the trust holds the title and I am its only beneficiary, and my lawyer had already filed the notice. There was no drama in the filing. There was a piece of paper, a date, and a locksmith who did not need a family story to turn a key.

My husband stood in the driveway with four suitcases, ringing a doorbell I did not answer. His mother told the neighbors I had locked a family out of its own home. I watched it on the camera feed from my office, nine miles away. I felt nothing at all, which after four years was its own kind of answer. The feeling had all been spent already, in smaller rooms on smaller days, back when each removal was still being called nothing personal.

Nothing personal was how they described the guest list that no longer had room for my cousins. Nothing personal was the way my grandfather’s study stayed shut because my husband found the old desk severe. Nothing personal was his sister standing in my kitchen talking about the house as though the deed were a feeling she had earned by visiting often enough. I corrected them less and less. Correcting cost more than enduring, or so I had managed to convince myself.