The marinara sauce had been simmering so long the whole apartment smelled like an Italian restaurant tucked under an elevated train in some old American movie—steam on the windows, red sauce bubbling, Sinatra on a jukebox no one could actually see. Outside, Portland rain slid down the glass in thin silver threads, blurring the city lights of Oregon into soft neon smears. Inside, in my narrow kitchen just off Southeast 34th Avenue, I wiped down the same clean counter for the fourth time and checked my phone again.

No new messages.

I told myself it was ridiculous to be this nervous. I was a sixty-eight-year-old retired scenic designer, not a teenager waiting for a prom date to text back. But my son was driving up from San Francisco, crossing state lines on I-5 with California plates and Series B funding money, and I hadn’t laid eyes on him in a year. That does something to a man, even a man who pretends it doesn’t.

The pasta water rolled into a heavy, thundering boil. I salted it like the cooking videos told me to—“Make it taste like the Pacific Ocean,” some cheerful chef from New Jersey had said—and was just about to pour in the rigatoni when my phone buzzed.

Parking now. Smells amazing from the street.

My mouth did that traitorous thing it still does when it comes to my kids; it smiled before I decided whether I was in the mood for it or not. I turned the heat down under the sauce, wiped my hands on a dish towel, and went to unlock the front door of my one-bedroom apartment in Portland, Oregon, United States of America—land of Costco, medical bankruptcy, and children who grow up to make more money than their parents can fathom.

Devo came in first, letting in a blast of rainy air and the faint smell of wet asphalt and eucalyptus from somewhere I couldn’t name. His real name is Devon King, but we’d never called him that a day in his life. Tall, lean, beard trimmed the way tech guys in the Bay Area do it now, he carried a bottle of red wine that probably cost more than my monthly electric bill.

“Dad,” he said, and before I could get out anything dignified, he had me in a hug that lifted my feet clean off the ground.

“Careful,” I grunted. “Sixty-eight and still cooking for my kids. If you snap me in half, you’re the one lifting my casket.”

He laughed into my shoulder, then set me down and stepped back, looking me over as if we were both trying to evaluate what a year had done to the other. His eyes flicked past me to the little shelves off the living room.

“You kept all those?” he asked.

I turned to see what he meant. The playbills—thirty-five years of theater in Portland and up and down the West Coast—were stacked in a neat leaning tower. Shows I’d designed, sets I’d built, illusions I’d spent nights obsessing over while the rest of the city slept.

“Thirty-five years doesn’t disappear just because my knees hurt,” I said. “You hungry?”

“Starving. Silicon Valley feeds us kombucha and stress.”

Fifteen minutes later, my daughter arrived, right on schedule and somehow still late in the way only she can be. Velma swept into my small entryway trailing the scent of expensive perfume and damp wool. She kissed my cheek, handed me a plastic clamshell of fancy store-bought cookies, and complimented the apartment in that bright, brittle tone people use when they’re trying too hard not to sound like they’re judging.

“It’s cozy,” she said, letting her eyes flick quickly over the old couch, the secondhand coffee table, the cracked baseboard heater. “Very… Portland.”

Cornelius followed, clutching his umbrella like it had offended him. He shook my hand without making eye contact, muttered something about traffic on I-84, and asked where the bathroom was. Ten years of family dinners, and the man still moved through my home like a tenant who’d rather not see the landlord.

We sat around my tiny kitchen table, wedged in like props on a cluttered stage. I’d pulled in a rickety folding chair from the closet so the four of us could eat together. The pasta came out perfectly al dente for once in my life, the sauce thick and rich the way my late wife used to make it when we were a young couple in a cheap rental in Queens, dreaming about running away to California. Life had taken us west eventually, just not the way we imagined.

Devo launched into stories about his AI startup in San Francisco, about board meetings and valuations and something called “runway” that apparently did not involve a fashion show in New York. Velma nodded along, eyes wide, playing the perfect supportive sister.

“Seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week,” he said, twirling linguine on his fork. “But we just closed the round, so things should calm down. Our investors out of New York and L.A. are actually pushing us to slow down a little.”

“Must be nice,” Cornelius muttered, barely audible, “having money to burn on startups.”

The words landed on the table like an accidental fork drop. The room went quiet, the way small American dining rooms do when money sneaks into the conversation like an uninvited relative.

I rushed in with dessert talk, the weather, anything, but Devo was already pivoting, the way good CEOs apparently do when a slide goes wrong.

“So, Dad,” he said, setting down his fork and leaning back, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

I took a sip of wine, already wary. “Ask.”

“Why haven’t you moved into the house yet?”

For a second, I thought he was making a joke I didn’t understand. My hand twitched. The rim of my glass tilted, and a few drops of red spotted the faded tablecloth like evidence.

“What house?” I asked, setting the glass down with more force than necessary.

“The one in Eastmoreland,” he said, saying the name of the upscale Portland neighborhood without a hint of irony, like it was the most normal thing in the world that his retired father should have a house there near the golf course where local lawyers and surgeons network on weekday mornings. “I sent Velma the money last February for the purchase. Eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars, remember? You said you wanted something in that neighborhood. I assumed…” He trailed off, confusion knitting his brow. “Wait. Dad, are you messing with me?”

The room tilted. The overhead light seemed too bright. My reading glasses, which I’d pushed up onto my forehead earlier to squint at the sauce, slid down the bridge of my nose.

“I never—” My tongue stumbled over the words. I turned my head slowly toward my daughter. “Velma. What’s he talking about?”

The sound her fork made when it hit her plate was loud enough to be its own sound effect. It clattered, rang, then settled, echoing off the cheap walls of my Portland kitchen like gunfire.

She went white. Not figuratively. Not “she-paled-a-little.” White. Like some invisible hand had reached into her and poured out all the blood. Her chair screeched backward on the old linoleum as she shot to her feet.

“I—we—I should—Cornelius, we need to—” she stammered, digging frantically into her designer purse with trembling fingers.

Cornelius grabbed her arm, but she was already moving toward the door as if the apartment were on fire and only she knew where the exit was.

“Velma, sit down,” he hissed, the edge in his voice sharp and brittle, the sound of somebody trying to keep control of something already spiraling out of reach. “Let’s just—”

“I forgot something in the car,” she blurted, and bolted.

Her heels—sleek, black, and probably north of three hundred dollars in any decent department store in Los Angeles or New York—caught on the threshold of my front door. Karma, it turns out, works faster in Portland than in Hollywood. One second, my daughter was fleeing what suddenly felt like a crime scene. The next, she was performing a full pratfall in the doorway that would have earned applause in any community theater slapstick scene I’d ever designed a set for.

Her Prada bag hit the floor with a dull, expensive-sounding thud. The contents exploded across my narrow entryway: a small constellation of objects spinning out in every direction. Three lipsticks rolled under my couch, a vape pen skittered across the hardwood like a guilty insect, sunglasses cracked against the baseboard.

And then there were the papers.

They fanned out around her like playing cards after a magician’s trick gone wrong. Thick, official-looking documents with embossed seals, signatures, and the heavy typeface of people who bill by the hour.

Keys jingled against my floorboards.

I bent down, old knees popping, and picked up the key ring. A brushed metal tag dangled from it, stamped with an address in neat, legal font: 4521 SE Woodstock Blvd, Eastmoreland.

Cornelius moved faster than I’d seen him move in ten years. Adrenaline, it turns out, will make a middle-aged man from Oregon move like a college running back from Texas. He had Velma by the arm, practically hauling her to her feet, and they were out the door before my brain caught up with my eyes.

The door slammed. My apartment fell into a silence so thick you could almost hear the marinara sauce on the stove settling into its own shock.

I stared at the papers scattered at my feet. My hands shook as I picked one up and lifted it toward the kitchen light. Devo stepped beside me and gently took it from my fingers, holding it up like evidence in a courtroom.

“Four-five-two-one Southeast Woodstock Boulevard,” he read, his voice hollow. “Purchase date… February eighteenth, 2024. Buyer… Velma King Richardson. Purchase price, eight hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

He lowered the paper and looked at me. “Dad, did you know about this?”

“I’ve never seen those papers in my life,” I said. My voice had that strange, flat calm it gets when the world has just shoved you off a cliff and you’re still midair, waiting to see how hard you’re going to hit.

“She stole from both of us,” he said quietly. “From you because that money was for your house. From me because I paid for it.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to make up some story about misunderstandings and missed emails and bank errors and anything, anything other than the truth that was laying itself out in my tiny kitchen like a crime drama on some American streaming platform I couldn’t afford.

But the evidence was right there on my floor: three lipsticks, one vape pen, shattered designer sunglasses, and a ring of keys to an eight-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house I apparently didn’t own.

At least she had good taste in theft targets.

Devo paced behind me, phone already in his hand, fingers flying across the screen, pulling up bank records with the ease of someone who lives his life tethered to databases and dashboards. I stayed standing at the kitchen counter, the property deed spread before me, the pasta congealing in the bowl and the sauce developing an unappetizing skin.

My finger traced her signature—Velma King Richardson—in looping blue ink. I remembered teaching her those loops and curves when she was seven, guiding her small hand over wide-ruled notebook paper at our kitchen table in a rental house in Portland, Oregon. Back then, she’d laughed when she wrote her name, like having it on paper made it more real.

Now it made everything feel less real.

“Look at this,” Devo said, tapping the date with his finger. “February eighteenth, 2024. I sent the wire on February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. Thought it would be poetic. Giving you a home instead of flowers or some cheap greeting card.”

“Four days,” I murmured.

“She moved fast,” he said. “Wire leaves my account on the fourteenth, house gets bought on the eighteenth. Deed lists only her name. Not yours. Not a trust. Not a joint ownership. Nothing. Just ‘Velma King Richardson, sole owner.’”

He scrolled through his phone. “Pull up your texts from that time. What was the wire labeled?”

I didn’t pull up anything. Devo did it himself, sitting at my kitchen table like it was a conference room in San Francisco. He logged into his banking app, thumbprint and face scan accepted without hesitation, and pulled up the transaction.

“Here,” he said, turning the screen toward me. “Wire transfer, eight hundred fifty thousand dollars. Memo line: ‘Gift for JK house purchase – Eastmoreland property.’ I was explicit. There’s nothing ambiguous about this.”

“So she committed fraud,” I said. “Wire fraud.”

“That’s federal,” he replied, the way you say the weather’s bad or gas prices are up. Facts of American life.

The word hung in the air: federal. My daughter, the little girl who used to sit backstage with me at a tiny theater in downtown Portland while I painted scenery and ran cues, now potentially facing charges that could land her in a courtroom with flags behind the judge and an eagle on the seal.

I lifted my coffee mug. The liquid had gone lukewarm. I set it down again without drinking.

Something tugged at the back of my mind—a memory floating just out of reach, like a prop light flickering in the rafters.

“Last February,” I said slowly. “A year ago. What else happened then?”

Images lined up like snapshots: Velma and Cornelius showing up at my apartment, faces bright, voices high. I saw it again clearly, like a DVR replay of my own life.

“We bought a house,” Velma had practically sung. “In Eastmoreland. Can you believe it? Cornelius got this huge bonus at work and we found the perfect place.”

I’d been happy for them. Proud, even. They’d been struggling financially for years. Cornelius’s consulting work was always “this close” to taking off. Suddenly, they had money. Suddenly, they were moving into one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon. I never questioned it. Families in this country don’t always talk about money the way they should. Kids grow up, get jobs, buy houses. Parents smile and say, “Good for you.”

“Dad?” Devo’s voice pulled me back to the kitchen. “You okay?”

“They bought a house last February,” I said. “Moved to Eastmoreland around the same time this house was purchased. They said Cornelius got a big bonus. That must have been this.” I nudged the deed on the table with a fingertip. “Your money. My house.”

Devo’s jaw clenched. “There was no bonus. Not big enough for that.”

“No,” I said quietly. “There wasn’t.”

I grabbed my car keys from the hook by the door. The metal rattled in my hand louder than it should have.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“The house?” Devo asked.

“The crime scene,” I said. “Let’s go see what my daughter bought with your money and my trust.”

The drive took fifteen minutes. My old Honda Civic—Oregon plates, bumper slightly scuffed from too many tight parking spots in too many aging American apartment complexes—looked downright shabby among the Teslas, Audis, and spotless SUVs lining the curbs in Eastmoreland. Tree-lined boulevards, manicured lawns, brick colonials and modern glass boxes—all the things glossy real estate flyers love to show off.

4521 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard sat behind an iron gate at the end of a long driveway. Massive, three stories, brick facade, white columns, the kind of house you see in prestige TV shows about dysfunctional wealthy families in the United States. Five thousand square feet, at least. Easy seven figures in the current market.

I parked on the street and walked up to the gate. It wasn’t even locked. Of course it wasn’t. People in these neighborhoods lock their doors out of habit, not fear. Real fear lives in smaller apartments with thinner walls.

The house had one of those sleek smart doorbells with a camera, the kind you see in ads during the Super Bowl. I stepped closer and gave a little wave, imagining my own face filling some app on Velma’s phone somewhere in Gresham or wherever she was hiding.

If she was monitoring her stolen property remotely, she just got the live feed of her father arriving at the scene of the crime. I hoped, for just a second, that she choked on her organic breakfast smoothie.

I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered through the front windows. Empty. No furniture, no curtains, no rugs. Just bare hardwood floors and echoing rooms. The kind of vacancy that makes sound bounce back at you and reminds you how alone you are.

“Can I help you?” a voice said behind me.

I jumped. An older woman stood on the sidewalk, clutching a Pomeranian that immediately started yapping like I’d tried to steal its Social Security check. She had one of those aluminum walkers with tennis balls on the feet and the polite curiosity of an American neighbor who’s seen too many crime shows and doesn’t want her peaceful Eastmoreland street showing up on the local news.

“Oh,” I said quickly, trying to smooth my expression into something between casual and non-threatening. “Are you talking to me?”

“Are you interested in this property?” she asked. “It’s been on and off the market. Such a strange situation.”

“I’m, uh, a friend of the family,” I lied. “The Kings.”

“The Kings,” she repeated, nodding. “Yes, they bought it last February. Lovely couple. I thought they’d be such nice neighbors, but they never moved in. Not once. The realtor comes by now and then to check on it, but otherwise it just sits empty. Do you know them personally?”

“Only met them at closing,” she continued when I didn’t answer quickly enough. “The wife seemed nervous. The husband did all the talking. They mentioned something about renovations, but no contractors ever showed up. Are you thinking of buying it from them?”

“Just looking,” I said. “Thanks for the information.”

Back in the car, Devo waited with the engine idling. He looked at me expectantly.

“Empty,” I said. “They never moved in. Neighbor says it’s been like that for a year. On and off the market.”

“Why would she buy a house and never live in it?” he asked.

“Because I would have found out,” I said. It clicked then, the way lights pop on over a stage when the director finally sees what the designer was going for. “She stole the house, but she was too afraid to live in it. So she bought herself another one, with separate money, told everyone about that, and kept this one quiet. This one just sits here, generating property taxes she pays with God knows what.”

My rental apartment in Southeast Portland could have fit inside the garage of this place. Velma always did like to go big.

We drove back in silence. Back at the kitchen table, the documents spread like a grim collage between our coffee mugs. The marinara sauce had cooled completely, a red blanket over the pasta that no one was going to eat now.

“I’m calling the police,” Devo said finally, pulling out his phone again. “This is straightforward theft. Fraud, elder abuse, pick your term. I don’t care if she’s my sister.”

“Wait,” I said.

“Dad,” he snapped, “she stole eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This isn’t a family argument about who gets Grandma’s china set. This is a felony. In the United States, you go to prison for less than this if you don’t have a good lawyer.”

“I know what it is,” I said. I set my coffee mug down carefully so I wouldn’t throw it. My hand shook anyway. “But I need to understand why she did it before I decide what happens next.”

“Who cares why?” he demanded. “She’s a thief.”

“I care,” I said. My voice surprised even me. It had steel in it. “She’s still my daughter. If we go straight to the police, we’ll get legal answers, maybe. We won’t get the truth. She’ll lawyer up, the way you put it, and everything will be about damage control and strategy, not about what the hell happened to the girl I raised.”

Devo’s fist hit the counter. The crack of skin on laminate made me flinch.

“So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Just let it go? Let her keep the house?”

Something cold and oddly familiar slid into place inside my chest. It felt like the quiet that settles over a theater three hours before curtain, when the sets are finished, the props are laid out, and all that’s left is to make the magic happen.

“I want her to feel exactly what I felt last night,” I said. “Confused. Betrayed. Blindsided by someone she trusts.”

My phone buzzed. I glanced down at the screen. Velma again. Her texts had been coming in all morning, each one more desperate.

Dad, please talk to me.
I know you’re angry, but there’s context.
Can we meet? Just you and me.
Dad, please don’t do anything rash.

I read them all and answered none of them. Let her sit there in that silence, wondering what was coming.

“Dad,” Devo said carefully, watching my face. “What are you thinking?”

I walked to my bedroom closet and pulled out an old theatrical trunk. Dust motes swirled in the afternoon light from the small window, suspended like tiny actors waiting in the wings. The trunk hadn’t been opened in years. The latches creaked like they were protesting being woken up.

Inside was my career in miniature: hologram projectors from a 2010 production of “A Christmas Carol” at a regional theater in Oregon, motion sensors from a staging of “Dracula,” sound equipment from shows up and down the West Coast. The tools of my trade, left over from decades of building illusions in American black box theaters and creaky proscenium houses.

Devo filled the doorway, looking suddenly less like a tech CEO and more like the teenager who used to help me run fog machines during Halloween shows.

“Dad,” he said slowly. “What are you doing?”

I lifted out a small projector, the lens catching the light. My reflection stared back at me in the glass, older, more lined, but still the same man who once made an audience scream just by making a shadow move at the right time.

“You know what I did for thirty-five years?” I asked. “I made people believe in ghosts. I made strangers sit in the dark in cities all over this country and swear they saw something impossible.”

“I know,” he said.

I set the projector on the bed. “That house is sitting empty. Velma is too scared to live in it, too greedy to sell it, and now too guilty to even go near it.” I looked up at my son. “I think it’s time my daughter’s stolen house became haunted.”

I texted Goldie Hayes at six the next morning.

Need your expertise. Remember the ghost effects from Macbeth? Coffee at nine?

She responded in under a minute.

Intriguing. See you at Hawthorne Grounds. Don’t get killed before then.

Goldie and I go back thirty years. She was the lead actress in more of my productions than I can count, back when Portland’s theater scene was scrappy and underfunded and weird in the best way. We’d done horror shows and psychological thrillers, plays in basements and converted warehouses, pieces where my illusions were the difference between a bored audience and an ovation. She’d retired from acting five years ago, moved into real estate in the Portland metro area, the way American actors sometimes do when rent keeps climbing and the roles keep shrinking. But her eyes lit up any time someone mentioned theatrical tricks.

I arrived at Hawthorne Grounds—a coffee shop on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard with reclaimed wood tables and too many laptops—at ten minutes to nine and claimed a corner table away from the crowd. The air smelled like espresso and rain-damp people.

Goldie swept in on the dot: silver hair cut stylishly short, black leather jacket that probably cost half my monthly Social Security check, boots that said she could still stomp across a stage if she wanted to.

“Jasper King,” she said, sliding into the chair across from me and studying my face. “Haven’t heard from you in what, three years? Since you retired and ditched us all for daytime television and early-bird specials?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“You look like hell,” she added conversationally. “In a way that means you’ve got a good story. Start talking.”

“I need help with a project,” I said. “Something theatrical.”

“You’re directing again?” she asked. “Please tell me it’s not another Tennessee Williams revival.”

“Not directing,” I said. “Creating. Remember that production of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ we did? When we made the audience think they saw ghosts in the mirrors?”

Her eyes went soft with nostalgia.

“The Pepper’s Ghost illusion,” she said. “Took us three months to get it right. Half the audience thought the theater was actually haunted. The guy from The Oregonian wrote that it gave him nightmares. Best review I ever got.”

“I need to make a house haunted,” I said. “Convincingly. Professionally. Not for a show.”

She leaned forward, voice dropping a notch. “This isn’t for the stage, is it?”

“It’s personal,” I said. “And before you ask, yes, it’s legal.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Mostly,” I added.

She smiled slowly, like a cat spotting a bird.

“Tell me everything,” she said.

So I did.

By the time I finished telling her about the dinner, the house in Eastmoreland, the wire transfer, the deed, the empty mansion sitting there like evidence with an iron gate and a smart doorbell, Goldie was leaning back with her arms crossed, laughter in her eyes and something sharper underneath.

“You want to gaslight your adult daughter with professional special effects,” she said finally. “Jasper, this is either the most brilliant or most unhinged idea I’ve heard all year. And I work in real estate in the United States. That is a high bar.”

“When do we start?” she asked.

“As soon as we have a plan and the equipment and access,” I said.

She pulled out her phone and started typing, like a producer making notes.

“Motion sensors,” she muttered. “Wireless speakers, portable projectors, backup power. We’ll need power sources, concealment strategies, trigger mechanisms. This is like our Macbeth production, except now the victims are real.” She looked up. “You sure you want to do this?”

“No,” I said. “Yes. I don’t know. But I know I can’t do nothing.”

We spent two hours sketching ideas on napkins and the backs of receipts. The coffee shop staff stopped checking to see if we were ordering more. Goldie’s enthusiasm pulled me out of the numb place I’d been since the dinner. This wasn’t just revenge. It was a production. A piece of art with a purpose.

That afternoon, I trudged up the stairs to the third floor of my apartment building to visit Oswald Tucker in 3B. He’d been my neighbor for six years, a real estate attorney whose business card listed half a dozen states where he was licensed to practice. His home office looked like something out of an American legal drama: bookshelves full of casebooks, framed certificates, a small flag in the corner.

“Jasper,” he said, opening the door in sweatpants and reading glasses. “Everything okay?”

“Need legal advice,” I said. “On a family matter.”

He ushered me into his office and sat behind his desk like a man preparing to bill me in six-minute increments.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, pushing his glasses up on his nose as he reviewed the documents I’d put in front of him. “Your son wired your daughter eight hundred fifty thousand dollars, with a memo line explicitly stating it was for the purchase of a home for you, in your name. She used that money to purchase a home in Eastmoreland in her own name. Correct?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you want to sue her for fraud.”

“Can I?”

He sighed, the sigh of a man who has had this conversation too many times in too many American kitchens and small offices.

“Technically, yes,” he said. “Practically, it’s complicated. Devo gave the money voluntarily. There’s no written contract beyond the memo line. Courts see this as a family dispute. A breach of trust. Civil, not criminal. You can file a lawsuit. You can spend the next two to three years litigating. You may win. You may not. Meanwhile, your family will be dragged through depositions, hearings, accusations. Family court judges hate these cases.”

“So she gets away with it,” I said.

“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “But if you’re looking for quick justice, the American legal system is not your answer. Especially when it’s family and there are no clear written agreements.”

I left Oswald’s apartment with a clear understanding: the law might be on my side in theory, but in practice, it would grind all of us down until there was nothing left but bitterness and attorney fees.

Back downstairs, I sat at my kitchen table and did what people do in twenty-first-century America when they’re trying to understand someone: I opened social media.

Velma’s Instagram was a curated highlight reel of a life that, in hindsight, looked increasingly fake. Beach vacation selfies in California with captions like “Blessed.” Brunch photos in trendy Portland spots. Inspirational quotes about family and loyalty. The month she stole eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars from her own brother to buy a house? She’d posted a photo of a sunset over the Willamette River with a Bible verse about God’s provision.

Cornelius’s Facebook page was full of bland motivational posts and shared articles about entrepreneurship. One quote about “family values” from a conservative American pundit made me laugh out loud, a sharp, humorless bark that startled me.

I took a screenshot. Evidence? No. Satisfying? Absolutely.

I called Diana Chen, an old friend who knew Velma through a yoga studio on the east side.

“Diana, it’s Jasper,” I said when she answered. “This is going to be awkward, but I need to ask you something about Velma and Cornelius.”

“Oh, Jasper, hi,” she said. “I heard Devo was in town. Everything okay?”

“Did Velma mention anything unusual happening with them last year?” I asked. “Financial changes? Health issues?”

There was a pause. Pauses are never good when you’re asking about your children.

“Well,” Diana said slowly, “Cornelius had some health thing. Velma was really stressed, but she wouldn’t talk about it. They disappeared for like two months. No classes, no social media. Then they came back and suddenly had that new house in Eastmoreland. She said something about a bonus and a big opportunity.”

“Health thing?” I pressed.

“She wouldn’t say,” Diana replied. “Just that it was serious. They came back… different. Quieter. I assumed everything had worked out because of the house. Why?”

“Just piecing things together,” I said. “Thanks, Diana.”

“I asked if everything’s okay,” she said gently. “Is it?”

I hung up without answering.

That night, at two in the morning, in a dark Portland apartment with the glow of my laptop the only light, I made my biggest mistake.

I’d found a YouTube tutorial—shot in some anonymous bedroom in some American city by a guy calling himself “Tech Ninja 2.0”—about phone monitoring apps. Software parents use to keep tabs on teenagers. Spouses use when they stop trusting each other. People like me use when desperation makes them stupid.

Turns out YouTube tutorials from men with gamer chairs and LED strips behind them are not reliable guides to covert operations. Who could have guessed?

I followed the instructions anyway.

I created a new email address. Attached a few old family photos I knew Velma would recognize. Wrote: Thought you’d want these pictures from Thanksgiving. Click here to download the full album.

The link, of course, went to the monitoring software.

I sent it and sat there, my heart beating faster than it had any right to at my age.

An hour later, my phone buzzed.

It wasn’t a notification from the app. It was a message from my email provider.

Delivery failed. Recipient blocked this address.

She’d spotted the attempt, or someone had spotted it for her. Shown it to a friend in IT. Or maybe Cornelius. They’d blocked the sender entirely.

I’d tipped my hand. Revealed that I wasn’t just hurt. I was actively trying to spy on them.

I threw my phone onto the couch, stood up, and paced my living room like a caged animal, hands in my hair, calling myself every name I could think of.

Goldie showed up twenty minutes later, hair messy, coat over pajamas, because I’d texted her in a panic and she’d recognized the tone of a man about to make his situation worse.

“I wanted to see what they were saying,” I told her. “What they were planning. Now she knows I’m watching. She’ll be on guard.”

Goldie didn’t lecture me. She just sat on the arm of my couch like it was a barstool and watched me wear a groove in the floor.

“So we adjust,” she said eventually. “Theater is all about improvisation. You lost direct communication. Fine. That means she can’t anticipate your next move. She’s paranoid now, waiting for something to happen. We use that.”

I took a breath. Nodded.

“Then we move to the next act,” I said. “And this time, I don’t make contact until I want her to know I’m there.”

The next morning, Goldie spread hand-drawn blueprints across my kitchen table. Floor plans of 4521 SE Woodstock she’d sketched from memory.

“I sold a house three doors down five years ago,” she said. “Same developer. I walked through this place during an open house. The layout’s identical.”

She pointed at a small square near the bottom of the page.

“There’s a basement window here, on the east side, behind some overgrown rhododendrons. The latch was faulty back then. The seller mentioned it, but never fixed it. If we need to get inside without keys…”

She let the sentence hang.

On my phone speaker, Devo listened in from San Francisco.

“You’re talking about breaking and entering,” he said. His voice had that tight, compressed quality it gets when he’s on a board call with investors from New York and the subject is risk.

“I’m talking about set construction in an unconventional venue,” Goldie said.

My hand hovered over the blueprint, over that little square that represented a basement window on a very real house in a very real American neighborhood. The line between father and criminal, between artist and vandal, between victim and perpetrator, ran right through that window.

A memory surfaced, uninvited: fifteen years ago, after my knee surgery, Velma staying with me for a week. She’d made my favorite soup every day. Helped me up the stairs. Sat on the couch while we watched old movies, laughing at jokes we’d made when she was ten.

What changed her? When did the girl who took care of me become the woman who stole from me?

I put my finger on the blueprint, right on that little square.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

The hardware store on Division Street opened at seven. Goldie and I were in the parking lot at 6:55, my Honda Civic’s trunk full of empty canvas bags and old tech equipment.

Inside, we moved through the aisles with the purposeful energy of people on a mission. Motion sensors. Wireless speakers. Extension cords. Power strips. Mounting hardware. Duct tape, because there is not a problem in the American theater—or in American life—that duct tape hasn’t at least tried to solve.

At the checkout, the employee eyed our cart.

“This is a lot of gear,” he said. “You installin’ a security system or building a haunted house?”

“Community theater production,” I said smoothly. “We’re doing a modern ‘A Christmas Carol’ in February. Lots of ghost effects.”

“In February?” he asked.

“We’re starting early,” Goldie said. “Smart theaters plan ahead.”

He shrugged and rang us up. “That’ll be eight hundred forty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents.”

Goldie leaned toward me as I swiped my card.

“Almost as much as a down payment on a stolen house,” she murmured.

Eight hundred forty-seven dollars to terrorize my own daughter. Parenting manuals in the United States do not cover this scenario.

Back at my apartment, we loaded the real equipment: the old projectors, the motion sensors, the audio gear from my trunk. Thirty-five years of accumulated tools, pressed back into service for one last show.

Monday evening in Portland came cold and damp, the air thick with that particular Pacific Northwest chill that seeps into your bones. We dressed in black like stagehands, work gloves tucked into our pockets, and drove to Eastmoreland as the early dark settled over the expensive houses.

We parked two blocks away and walked with our bags like a couple out for an evening stroll, except our gym bags held projectors and drills instead of sneakers and water bottles.

The rhododendrons behind 4521 SE Woodstock had grown into a tangled jungle of branches and leaves. Goldie stepped into the foliage with a pair of wire cutters.

“Cover me,” she whispered.

The snapping branches sounded impossibly loud, but no lights flicked on in neighboring windows. No one shouted. No American neighbor peered out to accuse us of vandalizing the shrubbery.

The basement window sat right where she’d said it would, half-hidden behind the branches. Old glass, old frame, old latch.

She pushed. Nothing. She pushed harder, angling upward. There was a soft, tired click, the sound of metal giving up after too many years, and the window swung inward.

“After you,” she said.

I’d spent decades crawling over sets, under stages, up ladders. I’d never climbed into a house I didn’t own through a basement window before.

My knees protested as I squeezed through the narrow opening and dropped into the dark. Dust rose around me. Cobwebs brushed my face. My feet hit concrete, and a smell of old air and old wood filled my nose.

I flicked on my phone’s flashlight. The basement stretched out in front of me: empty, unfinished, untouched. A blank canvas.

Goldie passed the bags down to me, one by one. Projectors wrapped in towels, sensor boxes, speakers, a drill, screws, a coil of cable. The tools of a haunted house.

We moved quickly but methodically. Years of tech rehearsals in crappy American theaters had taught us how to work fast and quiet.

We started in the main hallway. I drilled tiny holes into the walls at strategic angles, the sound loud but not loud enough to carry far. Goldie mounted motion sensors, tested their range, adjusted their positioning.

“This one catches anyone coming through the front door,” she said. “This one covers the staircase. This one gets the kitchen entrances. Wherever she moves, she’ll trigger something.”

We tucked wireless speakers behind crown molding and into the corners of closets. I’d recorded the audio earlier that day in my bathroom, the tiles giving my voice an eerie echo.

“Velma,” my voice would whisper from inside the walls. “Why did you take my home?”

Hearing my own disembodied voice echo through that empty house sent a chill down my spine. When Goldie accidentally triggered a sensor during setup and the voice boomed out of nowhere, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“If I die of a heart attack in the middle of this,” I said, clutching my chest, “you’re burying me in the backyard of this place. I want to haunt it properly.”

“The HOA would never allow that,” she said dryly.

The hologram projector was the most complex piece. We set it up at the end of the hallway, angled just so, so that when someone walked past a particular threshold, an image would appear reflected in a nearly invisible sheet of plastic.

We tested it twice.

My own silhouette stretched across the wall: distorted, shadowy, human-shape but wrong, like a man half pulled apart. It looked like those ghosts on American paranormal shows, the ones people argue about in comment sections.

“Perfect,” Goldie said.

We were back out the basement window three hours after we’d arrived. We replaced the rhododendron branches as best we could, making the bush look as undisturbed as possible, then walked back to the car in silence.

It was done. The set was built. The show just needed an audience.

On Wednesday morning, Devo called.

“The report came back,” he said. “I’m forwarding it now.”

I opened my laptop and pulled up the email. The private investigator he’d hired in California—because that’s what you do when you have Silicon Valley money and a problem—had been thorough. Twenty pages of financial records, credit reports, property filings. Names of banks I recognized and some I didn’t. Numbers that made my head throb.

“Jesus,” I breathed. “Four hundred fifty thousand dollars in debt?”

“Credit cards, medical bills, personal loans,” Devo said on speaker. “They’re drowning, Dad.”

“Medical bills for what?” I asked.

“The PI couldn’t get specifics. HIPAA laws,” he said, referring to the American privacy regulations with the ease of someone who’d navigated too many health insurance forms. “But there’s a paper trail to Oregon Health & Science University. Big charges starting March 2024. OHSU, Providence, labs. It’s… a lot.”

I scrolled through page after page of collection notices and court filings. It painted a picture of desperation, but not the full picture. The center was still missing.

“Then why not just ask?” I said. “Why steal?”

“Pride?” Devo said. “Shame? I don’t know. But they’re desperate. That doesn’t excuse it.”

A memory from twenty years earlier unspooled in my mind: me at our old kitchen table in a cramped rental, bills spread out like battlefield casualties. Velma home from college, standing in the doorway watching me add numbers. Three jobs. Scenic designer by day, hospital janitor at night, handyman on weekends. Fallen asleep over the electric bill. She’d made coffee and sat across from me, eyes full of tears.

“Dad, I can take a semester off,” she’d said. “Get a job. Help with the bills.”

“No,” I’d said. “You’re going to finish. You’re going to have the opportunities I didn’t. I’ll figure it out.”

She’d hugged me so hard my chair nearly tipped.

“I’ll never forget this,” she’d whispered. “Never.”

Maybe she had remembered. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she’d tried to take care of someone the way I’d taken care of her and chose the worst possible way to do it.

Thursday afternoon, I sat at a public computer in the downtown Portland library. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. People shuffled by with backpacks and tote bags. I typed an anonymous letter, hunting and pecking to avoid leaving fingerprints, even though that’s not how any of this works in real life.

The house is waiting for you. It’s time to move in.

I printed it, paid the sixty cents, and walked to the post office. I mailed it from there, no return address.

On Friday evening, my phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.

We know you’re behind this. Leave us alone or we’ll get a restraining order.

I showed it to Goldie, who’d come over to finalize the monitoring plan.

“They think you sent the letter,” she said, laughing softly. “They have no idea what’s actually waiting for them inside that place.”

“I’m worried,” I said. “They’re going to walk into that house with no warning.”

“That was the entire point,” she said. “You wanted them inside. They stole it. Let them taste what it’s like.”

My hand hovered over the phone’s power button for the remote kill switch we’d built into the system. I could shut everything down. Pull the plug. Abandon the whole plan.

I didn’t.

The system stayed live, humming quietly in an empty Eastmoreland house.

Somewhere across town, in their actual home, Velma was reading my letter, hands shaking, picturing me doing something dramatic. Cornelius was probably telling her it was a bluff, insisting I’d never do anything “crazy.” They had everything to worry about. They just didn’t know it yet.

And that, I told myself as I stared out at the rain streaking down my window, was exactly the idea.