“Bed bugs?” the guy asked when he saw me standing at the top of the stairs with rubber gloves on.
“Something worse,” I said.
He laughed like I was joking.
Sunday evening, my locksmith arrived. Big hands, kind eyes, smelled faintly of motor oil and peppermint gum. He changed every lock on the house, replaced the smart system, and programmed new codes only I and Cassie knew.
“Rough breakup?” he asked, not unkindly.
“You could call it that.”
When he finished, he handed me the old deadbolts in a plastic bag. “Sometimes people like keeping proof something ended.”
I set the bag on the hall table and thought, yes. Sometimes they do.
Monday morning, the sale closed.
At 9:07 a.m. the wire hit my account.
I stared at the number on my screen until it stopped looking fictional. One million three hundred thousand dollars. Not because the house was just money. Because for the first time in my life, everything the people around me thought they could seize had become liquid and movable and entirely beyond their grasp.
At noon I walked through the empty house one last time.