My father ordered security to throw my sixteen-year-old brother and me out of his country club. He was spending twenty-two thousand dollars on his stepdaughter's birthday. We were washing the plates.

The house smelled like packing tape and cold leather.

In the cavernous, two-story living room, Dad sat on the edge of a minimalist gray sofa, an iron firebox resting on the glass coffee table between us.

It was our mother’s box. The movers hadn't taken it away; the police had retrieved it from the trunk of Taryn's Mercedes along with the blue corporate folders.

Owen sat on the floor, his back against my knees, his hand resting on the battered metal lid.

"When your mother got her secondary diagnosis in 2021," Dad began, his voice barely louder than the hum of the central heating, "the insurance company invoked the experimental treatment exclusion clause. The immunotherapy in Houston cost forty-two thousand dollars a round. We did six rounds."

"We knew about the Houston treatments, Dad," I said.

"You knew what they cost," Dad replied, shaking his head. "You didn't know where the money came from. I didn't mortgage the Lakewood house, Willa. Your mother refused to let me touch Eleanor’s home. She said that house belonged to Owen and you."

"Then where did the money come from?" Owen asked.

Dad pulled a rusted brass key from his pocket and unlocked the metal box. He lifted the lid and pulled out a single, yellowed sheet of heavy parchment with a legal seal from 2019.

"Your mother didn't just have a life estate," Dad said. "She had a family indemnity trust established by your grandfather before he died. The trust held the mineral rights to forty acres of oil land in Martin County, out in the Permian Basin."

I blinked. "Mineral rights?"

"Your mother sold sixty percent of the production royalties to pay for her own treatments so I wouldn't lose my brokerage," Dad said, tears welling in his eyes again. "She made me promise never to tell you. She was ashamed that she had to sell the family land to stay alive for two more years. When she died, the remaining forty percent of those mineral rights passed directly into a private account in Eleanor’s name."

"And Taryn found it," I said, the horror dawning on me.

"Taryn found the dividend statements in the Lakewood desk," Dad said. "The Martin County wells hit a new shale formation last year. The remaining forty percent wasn't paying peanut dividends anymore. It was producing nearly twenty-five thousand dollars a month."

Owen gasped. "Twenty-five thousand a month?"

"Grandma wasn't broke," I whispered, standing up so fast the coffee table rattled. "Grandma was rich. Grandma has been making three hundred thousand dollars a year while sitting in that tiny room with a clanking radiator, wondering if her son forgot about her!"

"Taryn diverted the royalty checks directly to Vanguard Heritage," Dad said, his face buried in his hands. "She didn't just steal the thirty-nine hundred I was sending for nursing care. She stole every single royalty payment from the Martin County trust for eighteen months. Over four hundred thousand dollars."

"Where is it, Dad?" Owen demanded, his voice cracking with rage. "Where did four hundred thousand dollars go?"

"Offshore accounts in Nevis," Dad whispered. "Donald Vance helped her set up the corporate shell last November. The police froze her domestic accounts, but the offshore funds... the district attorney told me it could take two years of international litigation to claw that money back."

"Two years?" I yelled. "Dad, it is Tuesday afternoon! Willow Glen doesn't give a damn about Nevis or Martin County shale! They want eight thousand eight hundred dollars by Friday at five o'clock, or your mother is in a county shelter!"

"I don't have it, Willa!" Dad screamed, leaping up from the sofa, his eyes bloodshot, his hands tearing at his hair. "Don't you understand? The bank froze everything! Because my name was listed as an officer on Vanguard Heritage, the court placed a blanket freeze on every single account I touch! Even my personal checking account with eighty dollars in it is locked! The dealership unwound the BMW, but those funds were sent back to the frozen commercial escrow, not to me!"

"Then get a loan from your friends!" I shouted. "The people you bought twenty-two-thousand-dollar parties for! The Abernathys! Call Bob Abernathy!"

Dad let out a short, hysterical laugh that sounded like a dry branch snapping. "Bob Abernathy called an emergency board meeting of the Briarstone membership committee at noon today. They revoked my membership under the moral turpitude clause. He told me that having police cruisers in the driveway of a member’s home was 'inconsistent with the values of the club.' Nobody is lending me a dime, Willa. In Highland Park, when you fall, they don't reach out a hand—they pull back their skirts so you don't splash mud on them."

The silence that followed was suffocating.

Three days left. Seventy-two hours.

And we were sitting in a four-million-dollar house, surrounded by stolen heirlooms, with less than twelve hundred dollars in cash between the three of us.

"Owen," I said quietly, turning toward my brother.

"Yeah?"

"Get your jacket."

"Where are we going?"