My mom kicked me out of my office for my brother, forgetting I paid the mortgage, and the moment my desk scraped across that spare-room floor, I understood what I really was in that house.

The sound was hideous. It was the screech of heavy metal legs dragging across hardwood that had lost its finish years ago. My coffee mug rattled violently, sending a wave of lukewarm hazelnut roast over the rim and onto my coaster. My monitors wobbled like skyscrapers in an earthquake.

The power strip underneath, which I had carefully Velcroed to the frame to keep the cables managed, ripped free with a sickening tear.

“Mom.” I stood up, my hand hovering over my keyboard to save my work. “What are you doing? I’m in the middle of a session.”

“Carter needs the light,” she said, grunting as she gave the desk another shove.

She was surprisingly strong when she felt righteous. She pushed my entire livelihood two feet away from the wall, exposing the dust bunnies and the carefully routed Ethernet cable.

“The afternoon sun hits this wall perfectly,” she added. “He checked with an app.”

I stared at her. My brain was trying to process the logic, but there was no logic. There was only Deborah’s logic.

“Carter needs the light,” I repeated, my voice flat.

“For the studio,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron as if she had just done me a favor by tidying up. “We talked about this, Kayla.”

“No,” I said. “We didn’t.”

“You talked,” I said. “I’m working.”

Then he appeared.

Carter leaned against the doorframe. My younger brother. Twenty-six years old. He was wearing a beanie indoors despite it being seventy-two degrees in the house. He held a tape measure in one hand and his phone in the other, filming the room.

Filming my room.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at the wall my mother had just cleared. “Yeah,” Carter said, nodding to himself. “If we put the acoustic tiles in a checkerboard pattern there, the reverb will be sick, and the RGB strips can run along the molding.”

He stepped into the room, stepping over my laptop bag like it was trash on a sidewalk. He walked up to my desk—my workspace—where confidential client data was currently minimized on the screen, and tapped the monitor bezel with his knuckle.

“You’re going to have to move these, K,” he said. “I need the desk space for the mixer and the boom arm. The aesthetic needs to be clean. Minimalist.”

I looked at my mother. “You want me to move my work setup? Where—the kitchen table?”