“Mom is losing her mind. Dad is pacing around the house. Lyric already told her friends she was going to a lake house this weekend, and now she looks stupid.”
Lyric was Keaton’s girlfriend. She had never liked me because I had once refused to lend them my car.
“That sounds inconvenient,” I said.
He laughed once, bitterly.
“You always do this.”
“Do what?”
“Act like you are above everyone because you have some job and some house.”
I looked at the pot of pasta boiling on the stove.
“I have some job because I work. I have some house because I paid for it.”
“Do not start that. Mom and Dad helped you become who you are.”
“They cosigned one apartment lease when I was twenty-two. I paid every month.”
“That still counts.”
“As ownership of my lake house fourteen years later?”
He went quiet.
The silence stretched.
Then his voice changed.
It became smaller.
“Arden, I need this weekend.”
Something in my chest went cold.
“For what?”
“I told some people they could use the place.”
“Family?”
He did not answer.
“Keaton.”
“They are connected to some money I owe.”
I turned off the stove.
“How much?”
“Eighteen thousand.”
The room seemed to narrow around me. The lake outside went dark blue under the evening sky.
My family had not just planned a free vacation.
My brother had used my house as bait in a debt I knew nothing about.
My parents had either ignored it or helped him hide it because saying yes to Keaton had always been easier than parenting him.
I asked, “Who are these people?”
He said, “Do not make me say that.”
“Are they coming Friday?”
“Maybe.”
“Then hear me clearly. They are not entering my house. You are not entering my house. Mom and Dad are not entering my house.”
“Arden, please.”
That word from him should have meant something.
It did not.
“Keaton, I love you. I have loved you since you were a little boy hiding cereal under your bed because Mom forgot to buy groceries. But I am not your bank. I am not your shield. And my house is not a poker chip you get to throw on a table when you are scared.”
He started yelling then. Real yelling. Ugly yelling.
He called me selfish. Cold. Bitter. Lonely. He said I would die in that house and nobody would find me for weeks.
I let him run out of breath.
