Thaddeus closed it in sixty one hours. A cash buyer out of Singapore, no financing contingency, no inspection period, and the wire cleared Wednesday evening. Fifteen percent under market on a six million dollar property is an expensive sentence to write, and I have never once regretted the price of it. By Thursday morning the holding company had been dissolved, the proceeds sat in Zurich, and I was in a rented house outside Lisbon with the shutters open and no telephone number he possessed.

What I had not expected was the second folder. Thaddeus, being thorough, ran a routine encumbrance search before listing, and found that Dorian had twice attempted to record a lien against the unit, in November and again in March, each time using a spousal interest claim he had no standing to file. Both had been rejected by the registry because the title sat under the holding company. He had been trying to borrow against my home for eighteen months and had simply never mentioned that it kept failing.