I let the anger move through me and then out. Beneath it, something else remained. Something hard and steady, like bedrock.

Okay, I thought.
If family is the game, we’ll play with all the cards on the table.

The phone was still in my hand. I scrolled to another name.

“Aunt Patricia,” I whispered, and pressed call.

She picked up before the first ring had finished.

“Holly, sweetheart,” she said, breathless, like she’d been waiting by the phone. “Are you okay? I’ve been calling and your parents said you were still under and they didn’t know—”

“They sold my condo,” I said.

There was a sharp inhale. Then, for a few seconds, silence. I could almost hear her grinding her teeth on the other end.

“Of course they did,” she said finally, voice tight. “That idiot. That absolute… I knew he was planning something when he called me last week. He kept talking about ‘family investments’ and how you ‘wouldn’t mind helping.’ I told him he was out of his mind.” She exhaled hard. “Tell me everything.”

My throat protested, but I forced the words out. The voicemail. The forged signature. My parents’ reaction when I called. The timing with my surgery. The wedding. Megan.

Patricia didn’t interrupt. Now and then she made a low, angry sound, but mostly she listened.

When I finished, there was a long pause.

“You did something,” she said slowly. “When they almost lost the house. Back in 2021. What was it, exactly?”

I stared at the blank wall opposite my bed.

“I bought it,” I said.

The memory came back, sharp and clear, cutting through the haze.

I’d been sitting at my little condo kitchen table—laptop open, half-eaten microwave dinner going cold beside it—when my phone rang three years earlier. An old college friend, Jenna, who’d ended up working at the same bank that held my parents’ mortgage.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” she’d said in a low voice. “But your parents are in serious trouble. They’re months behind on payments. We’re at the point where foreclosure is on the table.”

“Foreclosure?” I’d repeated, heat rushing to my face. “They told me they were fine.”

“They’re not. They’re a hundred eighty thousand in the hole. In sixty days, that house is gone unless someone swoops in.”

I remember sitting there for a long time after hanging up, staring at the grain pattern in my cheap IKEA table.

Part of me had wanted to do nothing. To let the bank take the house. To let them finally feel the consequences of spending money they didn’t have, of treating debt like a game.

They had already burned through the thirty thousand I’d given them the year before—the money I’d been saving for a down payment on a bigger place. “Just to get back on our feet,” Dad had said. “We’ll pay you back next year.” They never mentioned it again.

But another part of me—the part that still waited, on some small, foolish level, for them to show up and be parents—couldn’t bear the image of them packing everything into boxes, Mom crying, Dad pretending not to cry, the “For Sale” sign hammered into the lawn of the only stable home Megan had ever known.

So I’d called a lawyer.

Marcus Smith’s office had smelled like leather and printer ink and stale coffee. He was in his mid-forties, tall and quiet, the kind of man who looks like he wore suits even as a teenager.