My Parents Sold My Seaside Villa to Pay My Sister’s Gambling Debts While I Was Abroad

and the water was a dark gray line in the distance past the low scrub. A heron stood at the edge of the marsh without moving, an image of absolute patience.

I thought about the email in Zurich. The thirty seconds I had spent reading it and rereading it, looking for the sentence that would make it make sense, the qualifier that would turn it into something continue reading …