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Writer's pictureCathryn Grant

Novel Excerpt: The Former Occupant

NOW: Charlotte


When Sara’s house sold, I felt as if I’d finally buried my best friend. At the same time, I felt as if I were helping her live on, giving new life to the home she’d always seen as a creative extension of herself.


Until that moment, the responsibilities I had as both the executor of her trust and her real estate agent had weighed heavily on me.


Not that I viewed carrying out her wishes as a burden, I was honored. My heart had broken into a hundred pieces as I watched her body grow frail, then fade into a pale shadow—her dark hair losing its luster, her eyes growing dim, and her breath becoming weaker each time she spoke. Every facet of her but her spirit. That remained vibrant until it slipped out of her body, utterly intact.


She left behind that beautiful Craftsman house, built in 1923. Sara adored that house and she’d poured her life and her heart into refurbishing it. To me, it felt as if the powerful force who was Sara Janine Linden-Price lived on in the wood and plaster, the paint and varnish of that house. Her spirit was embodied in the very atmosphere of her charming home.


In recent years, I’d asked myself how a house could start out with such love and hope, shaped into something so beautiful and welcoming, turning, almost overnight, into a place filled with animosity, and finally death?


Selling it to that couple filled me with hope again.


David and Trinity.


All the sadness would be washed away by this couple.


They had recently become guardians of her sister’s one-year-old son. Trinity had fallen in love with the house and had dreams of their newly formed family spending summers there. They would plant a vegetable garden and hang a swing from one of the three heritage oak trees on the half-acre property. She wanted to refill the pond with water and populate it with fluffy yellow ducklings. An arborist would be called in to look at the struggling peach tree.


This was a couple who knew what they wanted, two people who shared a singular vision, not the constantly shifting alliances and betrayals that Sara’s life had turned into as the years passed. Trinity and David and their adopted son would make it into the beautiful, love-filled home that Sara had envisioned, but sadly, never turned into reality.


It was touching to watch how that man cared for his wife. When Trinity left to care for her sister, David had taken over. He made all the arrangements to complete the sale. It melted my heart to see how eager he was to supervise the inspections and ensure all the paperwork was completed without Trinity having to worry about anything.


I was a little concerned when I found out Trinity couldn’t be there because her sister was dying of cancer. Just like Sara had. But David said Trinity didn’t need to know about that. Not right away. She would find out eventually, of course, but not for a while, not until after she’d had some time to heal from the loss of her sister.


I agreed. She didn’t need to know. I wouldn’t say a word.


I disclosed everything I knew about the history of the house. The abandoned well on the property, the beam in the living room ceiling that needed replacing. The age of the gas cooktop and oven. I’m required by law to disclose every little thing, down to the smallest detail—including information about the neighbors, natural pests, wildlife, traffic, and plans for future road expansion. I even had to mention noise disturbances. There were none in this quiet, rural neighborhood thirty miles inland from the Central California Coast.


But you can’t disclose what you don’t know. I might have suspected, but I didn’t know. I might have had a very strong suspicion. But because I didn’t know for certain, I had plausible deniability. That’s probably a legal term I shouldn’t have been tossing around, even in my mind, but I thought it applied to me. It sounded comforting on my tongue when I whispered it to myself—plausible deniability.

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