“I am the owner of this estate,” I corrected him, stepping into the center of the room, my voice steady even though every part of me was shaking with barely contained rage. “And I just heard you call my mother the maid in the house I paid six hundred thousand dollars cash to buy for her.”
Julian tried to regain his composure, adjusting his robe with a nervous laugh that didn’t reach his eyes. “Look, Natalie, you’re taking things out of context. It was just a joke. Your mom likes staying busy around the house. It gives her purpose.”
“Shut your mouth,” I interrupted, pointing a finger directly at his chest, close enough that he took a small step back. “You have thirty minutes to pack your personal clothes and get out of my house.”
Kloe jumped up from the couch, her face twisting in anger. “You can’t just kick us out, Natalie. We’ve lived here for two years. This is our home. Mom let us stay here, so you have no legal right to kick us out on the spot.”
Julian smirked, stepping beside Kloe like they were a united front now, some kind of team facing down an unreasonable outsider. “She’s right. Texas property law protects established residents. You can’t just throw us out without a formal thirty-day eviction notice. So why don’t you calm down? Go check into a hotel and we can discuss this like adults tomorrow.”
They thought they had me trapped in a legal web. They thought my long absence, my years spent overseas, my exhaustion after a transatlantic flight, made me powerless against their manipulation, easy to bully into backing down with a few confident-sounding phrases about tenant rights they clearly didn’t fully understand themselves.
They were dead wrong.
Instead of arguing, I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty in the afternoon.
“You think you’re tenants?” I said softly, in a tone that should have worried them far more than it seemed to. “Let’s see what the law says by nine tonight.”
