Page 76 of The Man in the Cottage

"Because she's isolating you! You haven't spoken to us in months, Travis. You've been hiding out in that cottage, ignoring your career, ignoring your family—"

"I've been living my life. My life, not yours." I step further into the kitchen, and she takes a half-step back. Good. "For years, I did everything you asked. I gave you money. I bought Dad his truck, paid for Savannah's wedding, funded every emergency you manufactured. And the one time I set a boundary, the one time I said no, you froze me out."

"That's not fair."

"It's completely fair. It's exactly what happened." I'm not yelling. I'm not even raising my voice. I don't need to. The truth is loud enough on its own. "And when freezing me out didn't work, you tried a different approach. You came to Kelly's house. You interrogated her. And when that didn't work either, you went to the press."

"We were worried about you."

"You were worried about losing access to me. To my money. To whatever you thought you could still get." I shake my head. "I'm not a bank account, Mom. I'm your son. But you've never been able to see the difference."

"That's not true." Her voice wavers, just slightly. "I love you, Travis. Everything I've done has been because I love you."

"Then you have a very strange way of showing it." I think about all the times she called asking for money, all the times she made me feel guilty for having more than her. All the times she told me I'd changed, that success had made me selfish, that I owed my family more than I was giving. "You know what real love looks like? It looks like Mrs. Dawson, taking me in when I had nowhere else to go. Not asking questions, not expecting anything, just giving me a place to heal."

"That woman is dead."

"Yeah. She is. And she did more for me in six months than you've done in thirty years."

My mother flinches. Good. I want that to land.

"And Kelly," I continue. "Kelly, who you called a gold digger. Kelly, who didn't know I had money until weeks after we got together. She loves me, Mom. Not my career, not my bank account. Me. The person I actually am, not the person you wish I was."

"You barely know her."

"I know her better than I know you. I know her better than I know anyone in this family." I lean forward. "And here's the thing—she knows me too. The real me. The one who made a terrible mistake and is trying to live with it. The one who misses his grandmother every single day. The one who's been hiding in a cottage in Virginia because he couldn't stand the thought of being around people who only wanted him for what he could give them."

The kitchen is very quiet. I can hear the clock ticking on the wall, the hum of the refrigerator, the sound of a car passing on the street outside.

"Where's Dad?" I ask.

"At work."

"And Savannah?"

"I don't know. Her apartment, probably."

"Good. Then this is between you and me." I pull out a chair and sit down at the kitchen table, the same table where I ate breakfast every morning for eighteen years. "I'm going to say this once, and I need you to really hear me."

My mother doesn't sit. She stays standing, arms still crossed, her face a mask of injured dignity.

"I'm done," I say. "Not pulling back, not setting boundaries. Done. I don't want to see you. I don't want to hear from you. I don't want you anywhere near Kelly, or near my life."

"You can't mean that."

"I've never meant anything more." I lean back in the chair. "What you did—the articles, the lies, trying to destroy the one good thing in my life—that's not something I can forgive. And honestly, I don't want to. I'm tired of forgiving you. I'm tired of hoping you'll change."

"We're your family, Travis."

"No. You're people I'm related to. Family is something different." I think about Kelly, about her friends showing up with wine and bad dating stories. About Mrs. Dawson, who took me in without asking questions. About my grandmother, who loved me without conditions. "Family shows up for each other. Family doesn't sell each other out to tabloids."

My mother's mask slips, just for a second. I see something underneath—anger, maybe, or fear. She's losing control of the situation, and she doesn't know how to get it back.

"If you do this," she says slowly, "there's no coming back. You understand that, right? You walk out that door, and that's it. We're done."

"That's what I'm counting on."

I stand up. The chair scrapes against the floor, loud in the silence.