One month to the day after I stood in that living room and heard my brother laugh, my phone rang at my desk.
It was my mother.
She didn’t say hello.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she snapped. “The roofers stopped. The electricians packed up and left. The living room is torn halfway apart. There’s plastic over the windows. The whole house is a disaster!”
I didn’t say anything. I just waited.
“We can’t live like this, Blaze!” she screamed. “Do you hear me? We cannot live like this!”
And I said it. Calm. Even. Almost gentle.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
Total silence on the other end of the line.
Then, slowly, “Excuse me?”
“You said it first, Mom. Remember? At the cottage. When I found out about the wedding. You all laughed, and Griffin said, ‘Didn’t we tell you?’ So I figured I’d return the favor.”
“Blaze…”
“If there’s anything else, you can talk to my lawyer.”
And I hung up.
My hands were shaking afterward. Not from fear. From something else. Something that felt a lot like the first breath after holding it underwater for ten years.
Two hours later, Tessa called.
“Blaze, are you sitting down?”
“I’m at my desk.”
“I just got the certified title documents back from the Charleston County Register of Deeds. I went through the trust agreement line by line with a colleague.” She paused. “The cottage is almost entirely yours. Not just a share. You are the legal majority owner. Your payments over ten years gave you controlling interest under the trust.”
I didn’t breathe for a second.
“So they don’t own it.”
“No,” she said. “They’ve been living in a house that legally belongs mostly to you. They’ve just been living there because you never said no.”
I stared out my office window at the gray Charlotte skyline.
They weren’t just calling me to beg me to turn the payments back on.
They were living in a house they thought was theirs. A house I could lawfully ask them to leave.
Tessa’s voice got sharper. Focused.
“So now I have to ask you, Blaze. Do you want to stop here? Or do you want to take this all the way?”
I watched a plane cut across the sky toward the airport.
I already knew my answer.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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