MUST BE NICE TO BUY LOVE WITH MONEY.

That’s when my stomach went cold.

Because I recognized that sentence.

Not exactly. But the bitterness. The tone. The sharp, personal venom of someone who sees your happiness as an offense.

My sister, Tessa, had said something close three weeks earlier at my housewarming barbecue.

“Some people always land on their feet,” she’d said, smiling too tightly as she looked around my backyard. “Must be nice.”

At the time, our mother had laughed awkwardly and shifted the conversation. Tessa spent the rest of the afternoon commenting on everything—the kitchen island, the crown molding, the detached garage—with the same sugary poison, as if every detail were a deliberate insult aimed at her. She was three years older, and for most of our adult lives she had treated our relationship like a scoreboard. If I got engaged first, she resented it. If she got promoted first, she made sure I heard about it for months. When my engagement ended at twenty-eight, she’d said, “Well, at least now you can focus on work,” in a tone that cut deeper than it sounded.

Still, even standing in that wrecked kitchen, I didn’t want to believe she would do this.

Then I remembered the security system.

The previous owners had installed four cameras, and I upgraded them right after closing because I lived alone. My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped my phone opening the app.

There she was.

Tessa. Baseball cap, oversized sweatshirt, latex gloves. Slipping through my side gate at 1:12 a.m. Carrying two cans of spray paint, moving with a kind of focused anger that made the footage hard to watch. She went straight to the back door, punched in the keypad code our mother had begged me to share “for family emergencies,” and vanished inside.

At 1:48 a.m., she came back out.