By the time we reached the Outer Banks courthouse in June, the house they were trying to take from me had already appreciated again, the market doing its quiet math while my family prepared to argue that love was a bill I had failed to pay. Their attorney—my father’s golf buddy—said foundation so many times it sounded like a spell he was trying to cast: they gave me a foundation, they deserved a share of the structure. My mother cried on cue. My father spoke about values as if the one hundred and seventy thousand dollars they had wired to Vanessa did not exist. Vanessa said she felt shut out and didn’t know what she’d done. Then Jennifer, my attorney, began to unspool the record: my zero-dollar parental contributions, my scholarship letters, the decade of deposits into Vanessa’s accounts, the Audi, the European trips, the emails about my “corporate sellout” career. On the courtroom screen, Vanessa’s Instagram photo appeared—her posing in front of my beach house, captioned some people get everything handed to them while the rest of us strugg… Continues…