Her parents had never understood privacy as something Claire was entitled to possess.
They treated her time as flexible because she did not have children, her nursing schedule as something that could be rearranged for family convenience, and her property as available whenever they decided their plans mattered more than hers.
The previous summer, her father had “borrowed” the lake house without asking properly and left beer cans around the hot tub.
Claire had cleaned the mess herself and then listened to him describe the incident as a misunderstanding.
She had changed the door code afterward, but she had eventually given her parents the new one because her mother insisted that withholding it was disrespectful.
Now they were planning to arrive with twenty guests and expected Claire to stock the refrigerator before they came.
She typed a single word into the group chat.
“No.”
Her mother answered almost immediately, asking whether Claire honestly thought she could stop them.
The laughing tone of the message bothered Claire more than an ordinary argument would have because it revealed that her mother did not consider refusal a real option.
Her father sent a voice message a few seconds later.
Claire watched the audio icon appear but did not press it because she already knew what she would hear: a command delivered in a wounded voice, followed by a reminder that families were supposed to share.
She could have explained the mortgage, the insurance, the tax payments, the maintenance costs, or the hours of work that had made the purchase possible.
She had explained those things before.
