The contract came as a PDF titled “Venue Agreement – Family Discount,” sprinkled with heart emojis and exclamation marks, the digital equivalent of a sugar rush. I opened it between code deployments, a sandwich in one hand, my brain half on a bug ticket, half on whether I needed to rent extra chairs. “Temporary occupancy,” “exclusive use,” “memorial access rights”—it all blurred into white noise until Emma, my cousin and unofficial bullshit detector, printed it out and dragged a highlighter across the landmines. If I signed, Sophia and Mark could claim residency, invest in “improvements,” and later argue that my cabin had become their marital home, emotionally and legally. Emma’s face went pale when she found their Pinterest board: “Our Mountain Home,” full of my deck, my view, my firepit, repurposed as their forever backdrop. But it was the recording of Mark at a networking event—bragging about “leveraging family dynamics” to secure “a mountain asset from a naiv…”—that finally shattered any illusion this was a misunderst… Continues…