She reached into her bag and pulled out a single sheet of paper. It was a list of assets.
"The house was left to me and my sister by our parents," Sarah said. "That is the complication."
"Joint tenancy?" Vance asked.
"Yes. She says I can't kick her out."
Vance sighed. "Technically, she has a right to access the property. However, given the nature of the... domestic incident... and the emotional distress, we can file for a temporary restraining order or force a partition sale. We can make it very uncomfortable for her to stay."
"I don't want to sell the house," Sarah said, her jaw tightening. "That house is my parents' legacy. It’s my design. It’s my home."
She looked Mr. Vance in the eye. The woman who had sobbed into a pillow for four days was gone. In her place was an architect looking at a flawed structure that needed to be gutted.
"I want to buy her out," Sarah said. "And I want to divorce him. I want a clean cut. Draft the papers, Mr. Vance. I want them served to him at his office. I want his coworkers to see him sign for them."
Vance smiled, a small, sharp thing. "That we can do. And regarding the sister?"
"Offer her market value for her half," Sarah said coldly. "But deduct the cost of the couch."
Vance blinked. "The couch?"
"She ruined it," Sarah stood up, smoothing her blazer. "I'm not keeping it.”
Chapter Five
Sarah
The house was quiet. Not the peaceful quiet of a library, but the suffocating silence of a tomb.
It was late, two days after her meeting with the lawyer. Sarah was sitting on the floor of the home office, surrounded by the few boxes she hadn't sent to storage—mostly financial records and tax documents she needed to copy for the divorce filing.
She needed a PDF scanner. Her phone was dead, charging in the kitchen.
Her eyes landed on Harrison’s old iPad Pro, sitting on the dusty shelf between a stack of Architectural Digest magazines. He hadn't used it in months, having upgraded to a newer model for work, but he kept it logged in for streaming sports.
Sarah reached for it. She blew the dust off the screen and pressed the power button. It had 12% battery left.
The screen illuminated. The Apple logo glowed white, then the home screen appeared.
Almost immediately, a notification banner slid down from the top.
iCloud: Photos and Messages Updated. 4,021 items downloaded.
Sarah frowned. He must have changed his cloud settings on his new phone, and the old device, sensing a Wi-Fi connection, had performed a full sync of his current data.
Her thumb hovered over the Messages icon. She knew she shouldn't. The lawyer had said she didn't need proof; theadmission in the living room was enough. But the human need to know the blast radius of the explosion was overpowering.
She tapped the green icon.
The threads populated instantly. At the top was Emily.
Sarah felt a phantom punch to the gut. She opened the thread. She didn't scroll to the bottom. She scrolled up. She wanted to see the history. She wanted to see the cancer growing.
She stopped at a date: November 24th. Thanksgiving.
Sarah remembered that day vividly. She had spent six hours brining a turkey. Her feet had swollen. Harrison had been "helpful," running drinks, while Emily sat at the counter drinking wine.
Harrison (2:14 PM): She’s basting the turkey. Everyone is in the living room watching the game.
