Her name was Tessa Quan. Reese recommended her. She was a real estate attorney with an office on the 14th floor of a glass building on Tryon Street, and she had the calmest eyes I’ve ever seen on a person.
I sat across from her with a legal pad in my lap and my hands clasped so tight they ached. On her desk was everything I could find. Copies of the old loan documents. The Charleston County tax records. Every invoice Low Tide had ever paid.
She read for a long time without saying anything. Then she stopped on one page and tilted her head.
“Now this is interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
She turned her monitor toward me. On the screen was a scanned document with my signature at the bottom. My twenty-year-old signature, a little shaky, a little loopy.
“Ten years ago, you signed a loan guarantee and a joint lien release on the cottage,” she said. “But that’s not all you signed. When the mortgage was restructured, the deed was amended. The property was placed into a trust.” She scrolled down. “And according to this trust agreement, because you guaranteed the loan and have been paying down the obligations, your share of beneficial ownership grew with every payment.”
I stared at her. “I thought I was just co-signing so they wouldn’t lose the house. My mom handed me a stack of papers after Dad lost his job. She was crying. I signed wherever she pointed. I didn’t even read it.”
Tessa almost smiled. “Well, Blaze. It looks like you bought yourself a lot more than you knew.”
I leaned back in the chair.
“How much more?”
“I’ll need to pull the full certified title history from the Register of Deeds to be certain,” she said. “But from what I’m seeing here, you’re not just the guy paying the bills. You have real legal rights to that property. Possibly significant ones.”
I sat there trying to take it in.
The house where they took those beautiful photos on the front steps. The house where they laughed in my face. The house they’d shut me out of.
I wasn’t just paying for it. I had rights to it.
Tessa watched me quietly. “So, Blaze. What do you want to do?”
I didn’t answer her. I just pulled out my phone and opened my banking app.
And in three taps, I canceled every single automatic payment tied to the cottage.
Roofing installments. Landscaping. Pest control. The water filtration contract. The insurance auto-draft. Everything.
No announcement. No explanation. No angry text message.
Let them feel it the way I felt that photo album. Sudden. Icy. Final.
Tessa raised her eyebrows. “Well. That’s one way to start.”
“It’s the only way they’ll notice,” I said.
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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