My grandmother was in that house. Eighty-one years old, dependent on oxygen, she had been staying in the back bedroom since November because the assisted-living waitlist was full. The furnace I had shut off with one phone call was the furnace keeping her room warm. Worse, Nadia’s livestream had shown the party but never showed my grandmother. The relatives dancing beside the DJ were the same people who had left her alone down the hall because they thought the noise would bother her.

My parents had treated me terribly, but my grandmother had done nothing. She had simply grown old in a house full of people who had forgotten her, just as they had forgotten me. The fortress I had built around myself disappeared instantly. I called the utility company, paid the reconnection fee, grabbed my coat, and drove three hundred miles through the day-after-Christmas snow. I kept imagining her sitting in that freezing room, unable to understand why the heat had vanished.

I arrived before the pipes could freeze. My grandmother was wearing three sweaters and smiling when I walked through the door. She thought the outage had been caused by the weather. Nobody had told her what happened. I packed her oxygen tank, clothes, medications, and photographs into my car. Then I took her home with me. I found her a place four blocks from my studio, paid for it myself, and promised her she would never again have to wonder whether someone remembered she was there.

My parents eventually lost the lease. They moved in with an aunt, while the relatives from the party scattered once the house was no longer a free place to gather. I did not destroy their lives. I simply stopped financing the life they had built on my money. I speak to my parents rarely now, mostly because my grandmother sometimes asks me to tell them she is warm. That is the only connection left. I thought revenge would teach them a lesson, but it taught me something more important: consequences do not check who else is in the house. And when innocent people can be hurt, proving a point is never worth the price.