She nodded, accepting the hit. She looked small against the backdrop of the massive pines, shivering in her five-hundred-dollar coat.
I walked past her, stopping a few feet from the foundation. I looked up at the house.
From a distance, it was majestic. Up close, it was a crime scene.
The yellow pine was already turning gray from UV exposure. There was water pooling on the subfloor where the drainage was pitched wrong. If they didn't get a roof on this thing in the next two weeks, the damage would go from fixable to catastrophic. The wood would swell. The frame would twist.
But it wasn't there yet. Not quite.
Ryan was a brilliant architect. But looking at this site—the disorganized lumber pile, the lack of covering, the mud—it was obvious he was a shit general contractor.
He had built a Ferrari and left it out in the rain with the windows down.
"Tell me about the money," I said, not looking at her.
"What?"
"The construction loan. How much do you owe?"
She hesitated, then pulled her phone from her pocket. Her fingers were shaking so bad she had to use two hands to unlock it.
"Three hundred and twelve thousand," she said, reading from a banking app. "That's what we've drawn so far. The bank cut us off after Ryan's last request—they said the project wasn't progressing fast enough. They froze the rest of the credit line. Whole thing’s due in July."
I did the mental math, and my stomach turned over.
They had burned through more than three hundred grand, and the house wasn't even dried in. No roof, no windows, no rough plumbing, no electric.
"How much to finish it?" I asked.
"Ryan estimated another hundred and fifty." She bit her lip, looking at the banking screen like it might bite her. "But he was optimistic. And he was... he was moving money around at the end. Paying interest with draw requests. I think we were already over budget."
"Robbing Peter to pay Paul," I muttered.
"Yes."
I looked at the house again. The damn thing was a bleeding wound.
"And if you can't finish it by July?"
"The bank forecloses," she whispered. "They take this property. And when that doesn't cover the loan..." She looked at me. "They come after the collateral. They come after…"
"Olivia’s house," I finished.
I stared at the timber frame.
Six months.
To take a shell and turn it into a million-dollar home in this market, with winter settling in? It was a suicide mission. It required a full crew, a seasoned general contractor, and perfect weather. Ryan had left us with none of those things.
"I can't do this," Lucia said suddenly.
The words came out in a rush, like she was purging them.
"I have three other projects," she said, her voice rising. "Two of them are bleeding cash. I've got investors calling me every day. I was drowning before Ryan died, and now..." She gestured helplessly at the skeleton. "I can't save this. I sell houses. I don't build them. I don't know how to fix this."
"So what are you going to do?"
"Walk away," she said. "Let the bank foreclose. Take the hit on my credit. I don't have a choice."
