The documents were the truth about the childhood home. When my parents were facing foreclosure five years earlier, the real number was not twenty-four thousand. It was ninety-one thousand, and there was no realistic way for them to repay it. So Rowan structured it properly. I did not gift them the money. I paid the arrears and the lien, and in exchange I took title to the house through a holding entity, with my parents remaining as tenants under a written lease at below-market rent. They signed it. They read it, or they were given every chance to. And for five years, the rent went unpaid, quietly, month after month, while the family rewrote the story into one where they had saved themselves and I had merely helped. Three hundred and ten thousand dollars in accrued, documented, contractually owed back rent. That was the contingency.

My father knew because his signature was on the lease. My mother knew because she witnessed it. Delphine did not, which is why she felt free to call me an egoist over four bedrooms in a house I earned while my parents lived rent-free in a house I owned.