Thaddeus closed it in sixty one hours. A cash buyer out of Singapore, no financing contingency, no inspection period, and the wire cleared Wednesday evening. Fifteen percent under market on a six million dollar property is an expensive sentence to write, and I have never once regretted the price of it. By Thursday morning the holding company had been dissolved, the proceeds sat in Zurich, and I was in a rented house outside Lisbon with the shutters open and no telephone number he possessed.
What I had not expected was the second folder. Thaddeus, being thorough, ran a routine encumbrance search before listing, and found that Dorian had twice attempted to record a lien against the unit, in November and again in March, each time using a spousal interest claim he had no standing to file. Both had been rejected by the registry because the title sat under the holding company. He had been trying to borrow against my home for eighteen months and had simply never mentioned that it kept failing.
They flew back on the Sunday. The building concierge, who had known my aunt for twenty years, told me afterward that Dorian used his fob four times before understanding. The new owner’s security met him in the lobby. Sienna sat on her suitcase near the fountain for forty minutes while he made telephone calls, and then a taxi came and took them somewhere else. He never got past the desk. I was told he kept repeating the floor number, as though the number were the argument.
The divorce took nine months and cost him more than it cost me, because the attempted liens came into evidence and changed how a judge looked at everything else he said. Sienna left him before the first hearing. He still develops, on a smaller scale, in a smaller market. I live in Portugal now and I run my aunt’s foundation, which she left in a mess and which I have spent three years repairing properly. I spent seven years being furniture in my own home, waiting to be looked at. It turns out I had been standing on the deed the entire time, and the only thing that ever needed to change was that I finally read it out loud.
