Chapter 1 - Twenty-Four Hours
My stepmother gave me twenty-four hours to surrender the bedroom my dead mother designed for me—or get out.
So I packed.
That was the moment Gwendolyn stopped smiling.
We were halfway through dinner when she dropped the ultimatum.
“Either give your room to Chloe by tomorrow morning, or leave this house for good.”
“I need the natural light,” Chloe said. “The basement is fine for you.”
“I work from the basement.”
“You can work anywhere,” Gwendolyn snapped.
I looked at my father.
“Dad?”
Samuel stared at his mashed potatoes.
“Paige, maybe just do it for a while. Keep the peace.”
There it was.
The sentence I had heard for nine years.
I looked at Dad one last time.
“Tell her.”
He lifted his eyes.
For half a second, I thought he might finally choose me.
Then he looked back down.
Silence.
“All right,” I said.
Gwendolyn blinked.
“What?”
“I’ll leave.”
I went upstairs, opened two suitcases, and packed everything that mattered.
Work clothes.
My laptop.
Mom’s jewelry.
A framed picture of her laughing on our old back porch.
And the cedar box I had kept hidden behind winter blankets for years.
Dad sat alone on the porch.
As I passed him, he said, “Paige.”
I stopped.
“Don’t make this dramatic.”
I looked at him.
“I’m not.”
Forty minutes later, I turned onto a private road in Paradise Valley.
A steel gate opened.
Lights came alive across a glass-and-limestone house built into the hillside.
My house.
Paid for.
Mine.
Nobody in my family knew.
But that wasn’t the secret that mattered.
Inside, I opened the cedar box and unfolded the deed my mother had signed eleven years earlier.
My name was on it.
May you like
So was Dad’s.
And Gwendolyn had just thrown the majority owner out of a house she never owned.
