I thought I was pulling off a sweet Easter surprise—flying in unannounced to visit my parents for the weekend. Instead, I found them living in the garage. At first, I didn’t even recognize the house. The door was painted a different color, the furniture was all new, and the space felt… wrong. Then my sister Cassandra appeared, all smiles and pastel decor, acting like she owned the place. Because apparently, she thought she did. “Oh, they agreed to let me take over,”
she said casually, sipping from a champagne flute. “It’s better this way. They’re retired. They don’t need all this space.” But in the garage, I found my mom wrapped in a winter coat in front of a space heater, and my dad fiddling with an old radio like this cramped, cold setup was just another phase of life. It broke my heart—and lit a fire under me. That night, I booked them a hotel and told them to rest easy. Then I got to work. I combed through documents, pulled the house deed from the county records, and confirmed exactly what I suspected: the house was still in my parents’ name. Cassandra?