I bought my parents a $650,000 cottage by the ocean for their 40th anniversary so they could finally rest. A few months later, my mother called me sobbing because my sister’s husband had changed the locks, put the house up for short-term rent, and told my father, “Get out. This isn’t your home.”

Instead, my mother was standing in the middle of the gravel driveway wearing her house slippers and a light teal cardigan as mascara tracked two dark paths down her cheeks.

She was weeping with such intensity that she kept pressing her palm against her lips as if she could physically trap the sobbing sounds inside her own throat.

“This is no longer your residence,” Chadwick Vance said again with a louder tone as if my father were suffering from a loss of hearing rather than a loss of dignity.

“You cannot simply wander into this property whenever the mood strikes you,” he added while looking down from the top step.

When my mother had called me only an hour earlier, her voice was trembling so violently that I honestly believed a member of our family had passed away in the night.

“Gavin,” she had whispered through the phone, “you need to drive here right this second.”

I had been sitting in a boardroom in downtown Boston, only half listening to a junior partner explain a logistics error that felt incredibly trivial compared to the terror in my mother’s breath.

I was already grabbing my keys and heading for the elevator before she had even managed to finish the next sentence.