Chapter 4 - The Company in My Kitchen
The secretary of state's website displayed Braddock Property Partners LLC as though it were a perfectly ordinary small business.
Manager: Brett Sloane.
Registered office: 214 Larkin Street, Fayetteville, North Carolina.
My address.
The filing had been submitted six months into my deployment.
I printed it at Mara's office.
"They used my home as their business address," I said.
"That isn't proof of criminal conduct by itself," Mara said, "but combined with the loan and signatures, it's a thread we should follow."
Brett worked in sales for a building-supply distributor and regularly told my parents he was about to close a life-changing deal.
For years, the deal had remained just around the corner.
Now I wondered whether my house had become his next investor.
Mara hired a title professional to trace the property filings and advised me to document the home's condition before anything disappeared.
I arranged a time with a neutral witness and photographed every room I could legally enter without confronting anyone.
My bedroom was painted pale yellow.
The walnut bed Grandpa had built for me was gone.
A crib stood where my desk had been.
There were stacks of unopened packages, a designer stroller, and a white dresser with brass handles.
On the closet shelf, I spotted the cedar box containing my mother's old letters to me.
The lid was missing.
I opened it and found nothing inside.
Paige stood in the doorway.
"I donated the old stuff," she said.
"My grandfather built that bed."
"Well, you weren't using it."
The sentence was so casual that for a moment I thought I had misheard.
"Did you ask me?"
"Don't do this," she said.
"It's just furniture."
I looked around at the room that had been mine since childhood.
"It mattered to me."
She folded her arms over her belly.
"Everything has to be about you, Quinn."
I went downstairs before I said anything I would regret.
On the kitchen counter lay a stack of invoices bearing the LLC's name.
One described a consulting fee to Gene.
Another listed a marketing retainer paid to Linda.
The figures were large enough to make my mouth dry.
I photographed the papers where they lay without taking them.
When Brett walked in, he saw my phone.
"Private business records," he said.
"In my kitchen."
"It's our family's house."
"It's mine," I replied.
For the first time, Brett seemed to understand that I was not going to surrender out of embarrassment.
His gaze became calculating.
"If you push this," he said, "you might find out things about Grandpa you'd rather leave buried."
I almost asked what he meant.
Instead I waited.
Brett's confidence faltered in the silence.
That night, a scanned invoice arrived anonymously in my email.
The sender used no name.
Attached was a bill for a survey of the Larkin Street property.
At the bottom, in red letters, someone had written: PHASE TWO — LIST PROPERTY AFTER TRANSFER.
They weren't planning to live in my house.
May you like
They were planning to sell it.
