At my 70th birthday lunch, I caught my daughter whispering to her husband

“While I distract her, you go over to her place and change the locks.”

Those words reached my ears like a poisonous whisper in the middle of my birthday lunch. Faith, my daughter, was leaning across the table, speaking into the ear of her husband, Grant. They thought I wouldn’t hear them over the murmur of conversations and the clinking of silverware. They thought I was too distracted cutting my chocolate cake, smiling for the pictures my niece Audrey insisted on taking from every possible angle.

But I did hear, and the most awful thing wasn’t the betrayal itself. It was the casualness with which they said it, like ordering coffee or commenting on the weather, as if stripping me of my home—the only thing I had built with my own hands over forty years—was as simple as changing the channel on the television.

Grant nodded. I saw his eyes dart toward me for a fraction of a second, seeking confirmation that I hadn’t noticed anything. Then he got up from the table with an excuse that I didn’t even register in my mind—something about going to the bank, an urgent errand, coming back soon.