Farah looked at him but didn’t interrupt.
“Her transmission is going. We’re behind on a credit card. Not forever behind. Just three months.”
“Two and a half,” Farah said.
Theo ignored her.
“We’ve had some expenses.”
I almost laughed, though nothing was funny.
“Then you call me and tell me you’re in trouble.”
Farah’s expression hardened.
“And then what? We ask you for another loan?”
“Another?”
Theo looked at her.
Farah shook her head.
“Forget it.”
“No,” I said. “You brought it up.”
Theo stood.
“Mom, this isn’t helping.”
“Neither is renting out my property behind my back.”
“We weren’t keeping all the money.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
He walked toward the kitchen, then turned around.
For a moment he looked seventeen again, trapped between a bad decision and the possibility that charm wouldn’t rescue him.
Farah spoke more quietly.
“We saw a way to fix a problem without asking you to pay our bills.”
“You decided the solution was to use something that belonged to me.”
“You barely use it.”
There it was again.
The sentence underneath everything else.
You have something we think could be useful to us.
“So if I only drive my car twice a week,” I asked, “can you sell rides in it?”
“That is not the same.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer.
I stood.
“I want the listing removed today. I want the family refunded. And I want my lockbox returned.”
Farah’s mouth tightened.
“We can’t just cancel without consequences.”
“What consequences?”
“The platform can penalize hosts. It affects ratings. There are cancellation fees.”
I picked up my purse.
“That is your problem.”
“Mom,” Theo said.
I turned to him.
“I’ll give you until Friday.”
“Or what?”
Farah asked it.
Not Theo.
I looked at her.
“Friday.”
Then I left.
I did not feel powerful driving home.
I felt tired.
I had raised Theo in a house where he had been loved generously. Maybe too generously in certain ways.
George and I helped when he needed tuition money.
When he and Farah bought their first house, we contributed part of the down payment as a wedding gift.
After George died, when Theo had a bad year at work, I loaned him money and told him he could repay me slowly.
He did repay most of it.
That mattered.
Theo was not someone who woke each morning planning to exploit his mother.
He was someone who let boundaries blur whenever clarity was uncomfortable.
Farah was different. She looked at problems and searched immediately for an available resource.
That afternoon, the resource had been mine.
I got home around four.
For the next hour, I moved around my house doing things that did not need to be done.
I folded dish towels.
Watered a plant I’d watered the day before.
Cleaned crumbs from the toaster.
Eventually I stopped pretending I was busy and sat on the back steps.
That was when I began thinking about the land itself.
Not the cabin.
The land.
And something Farah didn’t know.
George had spent twenty-nine years working in environmental planning. He wasn’t the type to lecture people about conservation at dinner.
He simply believed land did not always need to be used according to the highest dollar amount someone could squeeze from it.
After we bought the mountain property, he became involved with a regional conservation nonprofit.
At first he volunteered.
Then he helped with surveys and fundraising.
Eventually he started talking to me about conservation easements.