My mother answered on the first ring. “How dare you,” she shouted. “How dare you strip that apartment bare and leave your sister with nothing?”
“Everything I took belongs to me,” I said, voice steady. I surprised myself with my calm. “I paid for it. None of it belonged to you.”
“That’s not the point,” my mother snapped. “You knew she was living there.”
“I’m moving,” I said simply. “I took my belongings to my new home. What Vanessa does now isn’t my responsibility.”
My father cut in, voice tense. “We’ll take legal action. You can’t just take everything from a rental property.”
“Yes, I can,” I replied. “I reviewed the lease. I consulted someone familiar with tenant law. Nothing in the lease states that items I purchased become landlord property. And I can prove I bought them.”
Silence, stunned and heavy.
My mother’s voice trembled when she finally spoke, and I could hear the shift from anger into emotional weaponry.
