Page 140 of Levi

This is the one that finishes the job. Twenty million, Gulf-front, Alys Beach. The listing a career gets measured against after.

Outside, the morning’s already wrong for the early hour. The Gulf runs flat to the horizon, but the air over it has a heavy weight. A low dark wall stacked up far out where the water quits.

The radio predicted evening storms with more confidence than Panhandle radio usually risks. Ninety-one percent at nine in the morning. I’ve spent weeks fighting the AC and the terrace door for these floors. Tonight the sky will lean on them.

The house smells like nothing. It held from the first showing, the remediation, and the open-door war Levi waged on me that turned out to be half the cure. I noted that irony two weeks ago. I note it again. There’s a car at the gate.

Jonathan Mitchell comes through the door first, eleven minutes late. Dressed exactly as he was two weeks ago, down to the watch, which from Jonathan is a form of continuity you can close on. Behind him, the client, back at last for the second look she’s been holding hostage. Linen again, the pearls again, a woman who found her uniform years ago and sees no reason to change it. She slept in Seaside last night so the morning wouldn’t cost her a drive. A buyer doesn’t do that for a house she means to walk away from.

“Jonathan.” His hand, then hers, cool and quick. “Mrs. Taylor.”

“Caroline,” she says this time, which is the first good sign of the morning. “My friend Allison.”

Allison’s the looser one of the two. Sun-pink, here for the trip more than the house, already at the glass with her phone up. Caroline went straight to that glass herself on the first tour. This time she doesn’t look at the water once. She looks at the joints. Where the floor meets the wall, how the cabinet doors hang, the small honest places that tell a careful person whether a house was cared for or only listed.

“Walk me through it,” she says. The meter’s starting.

I walk her through it, and I keep my mouth off everything she can see for herself. The kitchen, where the stone runs in one piece because a seam is a thing that fails later. The stairs. The primary suite with the Gulf filling the windows.

I read her the entire time. What she leans toward, what she walks past, the questions she asks and the ones she doesn’t. She asks about the roof and the age of the systems. She asks who else has lived here.

“It’s been a rental,” I say. “Short-term, corporate, monthly. Lightly used and professionally maintained.” All true.

“Corporate.” She runs a finger along the windowsill, finds it clean, which I knew she would. “I don’t tour anything that needs explaining, Mr.—”

“Dante’s fine.”

She kept my line from the first visit and lost my name. That’s not an insult. The words were useful, the agent wasn’t yet.

“Dante.” She turns from the glass for the first time. “Explain to me why this house hasn’t sold yet.”

This is the question I’ve been waiting on all morning, and it isn’t the question she asked. “You’re asking what’s wrong with it.”

She doesn’t deny it. She waits.

“Nothing. The inspection’s in the folder, and you’re welcome to send your own people in behind it. What’s wrong with it is the price. There are maybe a dozen buyers a year for twenty million on this coast, and most of them want new construction and a valet out front. This is the other kind of house. It doesn’t perform. And the seller knows what he has, so it doesn’t discount.” I leave the quiet where the pitch would go. “It hasn’t sold because it’s been waiting out the wrong dozen.”

The line does its work. Jonathan, behind her, almost smiles. Then Allison ruins the morning.

“Oh my God.” She’s stopped scrolling. She’s looking at me now, not the house. “Caroline. It’s him.” She holds the phone up. “From the video. The one with Lee Streeter at that bar — the guy who pulled him off the — that’s you. You’re the realtor guy. Hashtag #whoisthisguy. You’ve got like nine million views.”

The room cools four degrees, and it isn’t the AC.

Caroline adds it up faster than I’d like. The noise. The musician. The circus that’s been parked on this coast all week, on every screen in the country. And now her discreet agent is the man in the middle of it. She came here to buy discretion. She is now standing in a house sold by the star of a viral video.

“Allison, put the phone away.” She turns to me. “I’ve seen what I needed to.” She’s a touch cooler than five minutes ago. “Jonathan, thank you for the morning. I’ll be in touch.”

That’s the Atlanta Buckhead society no. It’s a polite wall, and it does not reopen by being argued with. Twenty million walking toward the door in pearls, and Jonathan’s jaw has gone tight. I have about six seconds.

Allison is still half-turned, still lit up. She’s a Lee Streeter fan, the kind the scandal made hungrier, not shyer.

“Caroline.” She stops, because I used her name. “She’s right. I’m the man in that video. Nine million views, and you still don’t know one thing about me the video didn’t show you. No interview, no statement, not a caption anywhere with my name under it, and not for lack of people asking. That’s what I look like under a spotlight. Your closing receives the same discretion.” I let that sink in. “As for the noise, the circus follows Lee Streeter out of town soon. The house and the Gulf view stay. In the meantime, I can put you and Allison in the VIP section at his show tonight. The one every fan between here and Atlanta is trying to get into. Because your agent is the man in the video.”

Allison makes a high, strangled sound. Caroline doesn’t, which is how I know I have her.

“Are you telling me a viral video is an amenity?” she asks.

“I’m telling you a woman who guards her privacy can still enjoy the best seats in a sold-out house.” I keep it professional. Enthusiasm won’t sell her.