I Arrived at My Beach House for Peace but Found My Daughter in Law Had Taken It Over

“Since we’re all already here, I’m sure you don’t mind. We thought we’d make use of the place rather than let it sit empty again.”

Megan

Eleanor looked past her at the faces she did not know, at the shoes piled near her door, at the sand tracked across her floors, at the glass in a woman’s hand that she recognized as one of a set she had bought at an estate sale in 2019 because the etching on the side reminded her of Henry’s handwriting.

She looked back at Megan.

“Ask them to leave,” she said.

The room went quiet in pieces, the way a sound dies unevenly across a space.

Megan blinked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Ask them to leave,” Eleanor said. “This is not your house.”

The man with his feet on the coffee table brought them down to the floor. Someone in the kitchen turned the music down. A woman near the window looked at her phone with the focused attention of someone deciding whether to be somewhere else.

Megan’s smile thinned to something less comfortable.

“Oh, come on. Don’t make this into something it isn’t. It’s one weekend, and honestly—”

She paused. And then she shrugged, and the shrug was everything, the culmination of the word wasteful and the questions about bedrooms and the listings for rental companies and the conversation about renovations that Eleanor had apparently not been meant to overhear but had.

“It’s a bit selfish, don’t you think? Holding onto all this space when you hardly use it.”

There it was. Clear as a window wiped clean.

Eleanor felt the last of her hesitation detach and dissolve.

“I said,” she replied, “ask them to leave.”

Megan crossed her arms.

“Or what? You’ll throw out your own  family? After everything Robert does for you?”

Eleanor held her gaze.

“My son does not do anything for me that I have not already arranged and paid for myself.”

“That’s not how it looks,” Megan said, her voice sharpening. “From where I’m standing, you’re sitting on a property you barely use while people who could actually enjoy it go without. That’s not generosity. That’s—”

She stopped herself for one brief second. Then let the word come anyway.