into her wine glass while my brother, Mark, kept his head down, pretending to be fascinated by his steak.
“Excuse me?” I managed to choke out, my voice trembling with rising anger. “Mom, I’ve lived in the cottage for three years. It was an abandoned, rotting shell when I took it over. I put fifty thousand dollars of my own hard-earned savings into renovating it, not to mention hundreds of hours of manual labor!”
“Well, you don’t have a family, Julie,” Mom snapped back dismissively. “Mark and Chloe are expecting
