My Dad Texted: “We’re Selling the House Tomorrow.” He Forgot Who Actually Owns It Now…
The text came at 11:47 p.m., a blue blade across my screen while weather forecasts glowed on my second monitor and lines of code crawled down the first. The office was empty except for the hum of the HVAC and the soft tick of the wall clock my assistant insisted made the place feel “human.”
Dad’s name lit up in the corner of my phone. For a second, my brain tried to slot it into something normal.
Maybe he’d butt-dialed me. Maybe he’d finally decided he was proud of me for something other than “not crashing the car in high school.”
Then the preview rolled across the lock screen. We’re selling the house tomorrow.
Your things will be on the curb. Don’t come by. I unlocked the phone and read it again, slower this time, like maybe I’d misread a word.
Same message. Same casual cruelty tucked into a single line. No hello.
No explanation. Just a decision handed down like a verdict. My throat didn’t close.
My stomach didn’t drop. I just… paused. The way you do when a fire alarm goes off and you’re trying to figure out if it’s a drill or the real thing.
I stared at the words until the iMessage “Delivered” tag blurred. Years of my life sat inside that house—childhood drawings Mom refused to take off the fridge, a trunk of high school robotics trophies they never came to see, the thrift-store desk I’d dragged into my old bedroom when I got my first remote coding job. If this had happened five years ago, I would have been in my car already, flying down I-5 toward 1260 Alder Street, heart racing, rehearsing speeches about gratitude and fairness and how you don’t treat your kids like tenants.
But that was before I learned to read balance sheets and watch markets and sign my name on dotted lines that actually meant something. That was before Laurent Dynamics. Before Harborstone.
Before I realized I didn’t need my father’s permission to build anything. I watched the message breathe at the bottom of the screen, the blue bubble sitting there like it was waiting for me to break. Instead, I let my thumbs hover for a moment, considered all the words I could send—Are you serious?
Why? We need to talk—then typed one word. Okay.
I hit send. The bubble whooshed away. The office lights threw my reflection back at me from the window—dark braid over my shoulder, sleepless eyes, sweatshirt with a faded hackathon logo half-hidden by a blazer I’d tossed on for the mayor’s prep meeting.
I looked like what I was: a woman whose calendar was booked in fifteen-minute blocks for the next three months, who still, in some corner of her mind, hoped one day her father would look at her and see more than “the kid who plays with computers.”
I set the phone down, screen-face up, and turned back to the projections on my laptop. What Dad didn’t know—what no one in my family knew—was that I already owned 1260 Alder Street. Three years ago, when Hail Builders buckled and the bank primed the guillotine, I’d been sitting in a cramped coworking space downtown, working through a bug that refused to die, when an email from an old family acquaintance at Cascade Bank slid into my inbox.
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