Page 10 of Levi

I push the door all the way open and step inside. The apartment is small. Two bedrooms visible from the entryway. A living room with an old couch. A small TV on a stand. The kitchen has four feet of counter, an unusual kind of coffee maker I don’t recognize, and a refrigerator that hums loudly.

It takes me eleven seconds to walk through the entire apartment. I open the bathroom door and push it against the wall. In his bedroom, the bed is made with a quilt, blinds half-open. That door goes flat against the wall. The second bedroom doesn’t have a bed. Only stacks of boxes of listing flyers and real estate signs. In the living room, there’s a small step-out balcony with a metal railing. The sliding glass door is locked but I manage to get it open and slide it wide. The screen door behind it goes open too.

I grab a kitchen chair and use it to prop the front door open. Through the opening, I can see the exterior corridor, the metal railing, the empty parking lot below, and nobody on the stairs. Every room is visible from the hallway. Every wall is accounted for.

He told me to make myself at home. I should shower. I haven’t been clean since Nashville, and the hot water might help the hangover that’s operating behind my eyes. But the second bedroom is pulling at me. The space between the boxes and the wall is about the width of a body. The carpet is ugly industrial, the cheap grade apartment complexes install because it survives everything tenants do to it.

I lie down between the boxes and the wall. The carpet is thin over the concrete and I don’t care. My shoulders fit in the gap, the boxes solid against my left side, the wall solid against my right. The ceiling is eight feet. I can see through the open doorway, down the hallway, through the living room, all the way to the propped front entrance with the parking lot beyond it.

I’m good.

Nothing behind me. Nothing above me. Nothing I can’t account for.

I wish I had a place like this of my own. Not the big mansion in Nashville I currently live in, full of staff I never chose. A small place where I could be alone and nobody would bother me.

I close my eyes and wait for the noise to start. It runs on a loop, the same circuit every time, and it only plays when I’m sober enough to hear it. Today, I’m sober enough to hear a pin drop in the next county.

I wait, and nothing plays. I’m lying on a stranger’s floor between boxes of real estate flyers with his pretty face on them and I’m sober for the first time in days. Sure, I’m hungover as hell, and my head is splitting, but the chemicals are gone.

In minutes, I fall asleep. Not the kind where the body quits but the brain keeps running underneath, where you surface fast and wrong when somebody touches you.

A safe place where the dark is just the dark and nothing follows me into it.

Chapter 4: Dante

The Gulf has been blowing through the house all night, doing for free what I’m about to pay a remediation crew to attempt. Fighting me to keep that door open might be the best thing the tenant’s done since he arrived.

At nine, I shut all the doors, set the air-conditioning to sixty-eight, and let it pull the morning heat back out. A house this size needs every minute it has before the brokers arrive.

By nine-forty the air is cold and the room looks presentable again. Benji’s flowers stand in fresh water at the angle he likes, and the lemons are back in their bowl. The rug that drank a bottle of tequila is rolled up in the back of my SUV. I scooted the sectional eight inches left to cover the bare floor where it used to sit.

A buyer sees a finished room. A broker sees what’s missing.

At nine-fifty, Benji leaves and I stand under an air supply vent for one last check. And there it is. Last night’s weed, riding the cold air straight into my flawless living room.

It’s faint under the eucalyptus and salt air. A buyer in love with the view might miss it entirely. But I didn’t build this morning for buyers. I built it for people whose entire profession is finding what is hiding underneath.

The team from Destin arrives first, a husband and wife in matching polos with their brokerage logo stitched on the chest. They wear their marketing. Their shoes say volume business, condo towers, two million at a time. They will never sell this house, but they’ll send clients through it to make their own inventory feel reasonable.

The man from Pensacola comes alone. New watch, leased German sedan, hungry in a market that can smell hunger. He photographs the staircase for his social media before he says hello to me. He’s loud, and loud has uses in a market this small.

Jonathan Mitchell arrives last, eleven minutes late, which at his level is a form of punctuality. Navy blazer in summer heat, no tie. His loafers are hand-stitched and they’ve been resoled, which tells me more than a business card would. New money replaces. Old money repairs. The watch sits loose on his wrist, his father’s or his grandfather’s. His client book goes back three generations of the same Atlanta Buckhead families, and when one of them wants Gulf front instead of city, Jonathan is the call they make.

He stops two steps past the threshold and lifts his chin, and I watch him find it. Weed. Down under the flowers and the cold air, faint as a rumor. Men like Jonathan have built fortunes on hearing rumors first.

“Beautiful property,” he says. The drawl is Georgia, unhurried, courteous as a dinner invitation. “Someone’s been enjoying it.”

“The seller carried a short-term tenant before we went to market,” I say. “The air handlers are being serviced Monday. Full remediation, documented.”

“I see.” He strolls the perimeter of the living room with his hands behind his back, taking in the view the house was built around. The Gulf is laid out flat and blue to the horizon, and Jonathan gives it three seconds. Old money has seen the water before. “My granddaddy smoked Tampa cigars in his study with the door shut for forty years,” he says. “Wonderful man. The house never did give that room back.”

The Destin couple is upstairs counting bedrooms and the Pensacola guy is on the terrace filming the water, while Jonathan and I stand in the best room on this coast, politely discussing the one thing in it I can’t control.

“You’ll have documentation by Tuesday,” I say.

“I believe you.” He says it pleasantly, the same tone he’d use to decline dessert. “Here’s my situation. I have a client. Recently simplified her life, and the settlement was generous.” One word for the divorce, one for the money. “She’s flexible on number and allergic to projects. She wants to walk into a finished life with a toothbrush and a golf bag. She doesn’t tour anything that requires an explanation.”

“This house won’t require one,” I tell him.