I let Corinne in. Only Corinne. Blake waited in his car. At my kitchen table, she told me the truth. Odette had been talking about my house for a year, and Blake had started agreeing. Corinne hadn’t stopped them. She had been taking Italian lessons with Odette for months. She said the line at dinner because Odette had been warm to her in a way I hadn’t been since her father died. That part hurt, because it was true.

After Clement died, I buried myself in work and paid for everything instead of showing up. I sent money when I should have sent myself. Corinne cried when I said it out loud. So did I. We agreed on something new that afternoon. No more monthly transfers. No more co-signing. But every Sunday, she would come to dinner, and we would actually talk. I gave her a new key that afternoon, one that worked.

Blake didn’t take it well. He told Corinne her mother was punishing them. She told him his mother had planned to sell my house. They went to counseling, and Blake took a second job to cover the rent I no longer paid. He eventually apologized to me in person, stiffly. Odette sent me a stiff card at Christmas. I sent one back, written in Italian. She never answered.

In the spring, Corinne and I flew to Florence together, just the two of us. I showed her the little apartment above the bakery where I lived at twenty-five. On our last night, over dinner by the river, she raised her glass and said something in careful, terrible Italian. She had been practicing for weeks. She had said, “You were always the mother I needed. I just didn’t see it.” I laughed until I cried. “You’re the daughter I always wanted,” I told her.