I don’t remember any of that. I only remember the disbelief and betrayal of my father in taking up with Mrs. Rose before the flowers on my mother’s grave were frostbitten. He grabbed Ronnie’s shirtfront. He defied Adele for me.

Adele clasps her hands together in an operatic pose. “He needed me to take care of you, but I needed him to love me.”

I think I’m going to be sick. “And did he?”

Adele stands up, stretching as tall as she can. “Yes, he did.”

My silent father doing as Adele commands—that’s what I remember of their relationship. If that’s love, then I guess he did love her.

“I wanted to love you, Justine. But you wouldn’t let me.” This is revisionist history spilling out of her mouth. Adele’s version of my life as a foundling.

“I was a bereaved child.”

“You were hostile and intractable.”

“I believe that I still am. I didn’t need you to love me, Adele. I needed my father’s love. You deprived me of that.”

“How?”

“By making sure every wrong I did and every mistake I made was pointed out. And everything that Paul did got a gold star and was hung on the refrigerator.”

“You sound like a child. A jealous child, which you always were.”

“Of course I was. I was jealous in the same way that Cinderella was jealous of her stepsisters; they had the unconditional love of their mother’s husband and his own flesh and blood served them.”

“You never served—”

“Adele, you’re being literal. I’m saying that I felt, and feel, like a second-class citizen in this house and you made my father treat me like one. Now he’s gone, and I’m done. You’ll never have to think about me again. Oh, wait, you probably don’t think about me anyway. It won’t be a loss.”

Adele doesn’t say anything to that. She backs down, steps away from me, walks around the small kitchen, pushing canisters back into alignment, testing the countertop for crumbs. “Justine. What are you going to do about the house? I can’t live without the rents.”

I finally get it. Now, after all these years, Adele needs me. Not for myself—she’s already proved that she needs my service, if not my affection—but for the one thing my father, in the end, refused her; the income from the house next door.