CHAPTER 5: A HOUSE BUILT BEFORE HIM
The house Grant ordered me to leave was a renovated brick colonial in Brookline. My grandmother had purchased it decades earlier; my mother transferred it to me through an estate arrangement before I married. Grant had paid for a new terrace and liked to refer to the property as “my place” when entertaining clients. I had stopped correcting him because the argument never seemed worth the evening. It was worth it now. Helena asked for the deed, and I produced the certified copy from the digital vault my accountant maintained. My name appeared alone. Grant had no authority to evict me by announcing it at a party. Nor could he simply rewrite the terms of a trust. But a forged deed or lien could create a legal mess even if eventually defeated. “We need to know whether anything has already been recorded,” Helena said. I imagined June’s bedroom, her telescope angled toward the window, the glow-in-the-dark constellations we had stuck to the ceiling together. Grant had looked at those rooms and calculated their market value. His mother had looked at our daughter and seen a problem with the family name. The realization hurt more than the spectacle in the ballroom. I asked Helena to check the land records and help me make a safe plan for the night. My parents offered their guest suite, and I accepted. I was not surrendering my home. I was choosing a quiet place where June could sleep while we learned what Grant had done.
