“There’s always a reason when it’s you.”

He glanced past me into the house. “You really had it taken.”

“It was still mine.”

He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Over a joke.”

I crossed my arms. “Call it that again and we’re done.”

That made him pause.

Not because he agreed—but because he realized, maybe for the first time, that I wasn’t standing there to be managed. I was standing in a home I bought myself, wearing clothes I paid for myself, with enough legal and financial knowledge to make his old intimidation tactics feel outdated.

He looked away first.

Then said, “Your uncle drove by this morning. The neighbors saw it being loaded. Cheryl’s already talking. Your mother is beside herself.”

I almost laughed. There it was. Not remorse. Optics.

“You raised a glass to humiliate me in public,” I said. “Now you get to experience community.”

He took off his sunglasses and held them loosely. “You always think everything is an attack.”

“No,” I said. “I just stopped pretending it isn’t.”

That landed.

I saw it in his face—the moment memory started lining itself up whether he wanted it to or not. The birthday jokes. The scholarship comments. The digs about my clothes, my apartment, my job, my being unmarried, my earning more than Dean but somehow counting less. He might never name it honestly. Men like him rarely do. But he recognized the accumulation.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

There it was.