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“Mr. Torres?” she asks, her eyes darting behind me as if she needs to assess the danger of being here alone.
“Yes,” I manage with an almost calm voice as I hold my hand out to shake hers.
“Amy Degrassi, I’m from Sky Realty.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say before stepping aside. “Please come in.”
She falters in the doorway, and it’s clear she’s uncomfortable.
“There’s no need for you to be uneasy. I just got some life-altering news. It has nothing to do with you.”
Her teeth worry her bottom lip, but she must decide I’m no threat because she steps inside.
“May we leave the door open?”
“Of course,” I answer, hating that any woman would be afraid to be alone with me.
The realization makes me push down the irritation I feel over my current situation, and I plant a smile on my face.
“I haven’t had the chance to clear anything out, but I’m looking to sell as-is. A fixer-upper for a property management company or something,” I tell her as we walk deeper into the house. “I know it needs a lot of work, but full disclosure, I don’t plan to fix a single thing.”
“That will prevent many families from being able to purchase.”
“I know.”
Honestly, I’d rather just let the property sit until it was condemned but throwing away money on property taxes isn’t reasonable.
“There are three bedrooms, one bathroom. The garage is filled with trash. The carpet is utterly disgusting. As you can see,” I point to the living room walls, “There are holes everywhere.”
She cringes as she looks around the room, and I know it’s clear to her that the man who lived here was an angry bastard.
She follows me to the master bedroom, which even calling that is a joke. It’s just as small as the other two on the property.
“One bathroom is a hard sell,” she mutters as she stands in the hallway looking into the room that was designated as mine as a kid.
She didn’t want to fully walk into the master, but something catches her eyes in my old room. Muscles along my spine tense as she looks down at the closet door.
“Locks on the inside of the closet?”
I grunt in response, not needing to explain the messed-up things I had to do to stay safe before I was old enough to walk out the front door without triggering my grandfather’s need to call me in as a missing child.
I wish I could say I forgot about this room, but that would be impossible. The memories are alive and well, but I haven’t stepped foot in here since I returned, choosing rather to crash on the sofa.
“What are you expecting to get for the property?” Amy asks as she walks back toward the living room without so much as poking her head into the third bedroom.
“Enough to cover the back taxes from the last couple of years,” I explain.
I haven’t dug much around my grandfather’s shit, but the late notices and foreclosure warnings are hard to miss seeing as they have arrived daily since I returned to town.
“Are there any liens on the property?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I’ll have to dig in deeper.” She looks around the room one last time before meeting my eyes. “Have you considered just letting a foreclosure go through?”
I pull my eyes from her, looking around the room and trying to see more than just my fucked-up childhood after my parents died. It’s nearly impossible to remember any good times, and I certainly had none in this home, but my mother did. She was raised with love and devotion, parents who doted on her until she made the wrong choice in a man that would rip her from all of our lives.
“If you could start the process, that would be great. I don’t know much about what’s required, so I’m depending on you to walk me through this process.”
I’ve only ever signed paperwork for a residence once, and since that was a condo in a brand-new construction site, there weren’t many hoops to jump through. I’m completely out of my league here.
As I walk Amy to the open front door, I can’t help but wonder if I’m just going to have to suck up my issues with this house and stay here for a while. That means fixing several things just to make it inhabitable because I won’t walk away from my son, no matter how bad my back hurts in the morning from the busted springs on that shitty sofa.
“I’ll be in touch,” she says, but there’s not an ounce of enthusiasm in her voice.
She won’t make much of a commission on this property even if we do get to the point of selling. It’ll take a miracle to find someone to purchase because there are many houses in this neighborhood—several on this very block—that have just been left to rot.
