Chapter 3: Sole Owner
Renee Park has been my friend since we were fourteen and my lawyer since I bought the house. She has a silver bob and red reading glasses, and she reads documents the way other people read the end of a mystery novel.
I laid the disbursement sheet on her desk on Tuesday at lunch. She read it twice.
“Your father mortgaged his house to bail out your brother,” she said. “And then your brother let you think it was Dad’s fault.”
“I don’t think Travis knows,” I said. “I think Dad signed it and never told him where it came from. Travis just thought his debts went away.”
“Mm.” She slid the paper back. “Meg. Why haven’t you told him you own the house?”
“Dad asked me not to.”
“Your dad,” she said gently, “has been gone two years.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. The truth was simpler and uglier. I didn’t want to tell Travis that Dad had lost the house, because then I’d have to tell him why, and then we’d be standing on the porch with the worst thing either of us had ever known between us. I’d rather he think I was greedy than know that.
Renee pulled up the county records on her screen and turned it toward me. Warranty deed. Grantee: Margaret A. Hollis. One name.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what I want. Put it in writing. Tell him he doesn’t have permission to enter the property, period. Don’t explain, don’t argue, just that sentence. Change your locks. Put a camera on the door. If he goes in without your permission, that’s not a family dispute, that’s breaking and entering, and you call the police, not him.”
“He’s my brother.”
“Then it’ll be your brother who did it.” She took off her glasses. “You’re not going to hurt him, Meg. You’re going to let the law tell him what you couldn’t.”
That night a locksmith changed every lock in the house. I put a doorbell camera on the front door and another on the back. Then I sat at Dad’s kitchen table and typed the text, word for word what Renee had written on a sticky note.
Travis, you do not have permission to enter my house or move anything into it. Please don’t come here.
He answered in less than a minute.
MY house too. I don’t need permission from you.
Then, a minute later:
Kayla found a guy. We’re doing this the easy way or the hard way.
I screenshotted both and emailed them to Renee. I didn’t reply. I sat there for a long time with the phone face down on the table, listening to the new deadbolt’s silence, and wondering what kind of sister changes the locks on her own brother.
Wednesday was quiet. Thursday was quiet. Mr. Brandt across the street waved at me when I left for work, which he’d never done before, and I wondered how much he’d heard on Sunday.
On Tuesday, eight days after the U-Haul, I was between patients at the office, eating a yogurt in the break room, when my phone buzzed on the table.
Someone is at your Front Door.
I opened the camera app.
A white van was parked in my driveway, behind Travis’s truck and the U-Haul trailer. A man in a gray work shirt knelt at my front door with a toolbox open beside him. Travis stood over him with his arms crossed, nodding. Kayla sat on the porch swing, one hand on her belly, looking at her phone.
The man in the gray shirt lifted a drill to my lock.
I heard it through the little speaker on my phone, a high, grinding whine.
He was already drilling.
