Page 3 of Levi

That damn line again.

I leave it where it lies.

Chapter 2: Dante

I’m in the driveway of the beach house at six in the morning because I don’t trust perfection to hold overnight.

Benji and I finished staging the house late last night after two full days of sourcing, placing, arguing about throw pillows, and sourcing again when the first set of hydrangeas weren’t the right shade of purple. Between us we haven’t lost a showing yet.

This is my biggest listing. Gulf-front, three stories, Alys Beach, the most exclusive stretch on 30A. The seller is a developer out of Atlanta who buys properties the way traders buy stocks. He doesn’t care about this house. He cares about the return. I care about the commission, the reputation, and the brokers driving in from Destin, Pensacola, and Atlanta today for a ten AM showing that needs to be flawless. This is the listing that makes my name on this coast.

It’s taken months of work. Flying between Miami and the Panhandle every other week, learning a market that runs on old money and developer contacts that take years to build. My first listing here was a $3.2 million condo. Four closed since then. Benji stages every one of them in between planning weddings for the same clientele. We’re a smooth operation, and this house is its best work.

I’ve planned everything down to the very last detail. My linen shirt and slacks are pressed. Leather shoes, Italian, cognac brown, chosen specifically because buyers at this price point decide in the first four seconds whether they want to do business with me.

I punch the door code, turn the handle, and push it open. The smell hits me before I clear the threshold. Weed, heavy and stale, baked into the air so thoroughly that the AC has been recycling it through the vents for hours, grinding it into the upholstery and every soft surface in the house. Under the weed, tequila. Under the tequila, the sour chemical smell of liquor metabolized through skin.

The house should smell like hydrangeas and eucalyptus. We left it perfect eight hours ago. I walk into the living room. The hydrangeas are knocked sideways, vase tipped, water pooled across the walnut runner that Benji spent hours selecting from a catalog.

He stood at the dining table last night and arranged those hydrangeas with the eucalyptus loose around them, organic, because he said, “a buyer doesn’t want a formal centerpiece, they want to feel like the flowers were just picked from a garden they haven’t planted yet.” He adjusted the stems three times. He stepped back and looked at them from the angle a buyer would see walking in from the foyer. He moved one stem to the left. Now they’re dead on the table in a puddle of water.

The lemons have rolled out of the bowl. Several are on the floor. The cookbook is shut with the spine up, cracking the binding. The accent chair I rented from a design house is on its side near the island. A tequila bottle on the kitchen counter, mostly empty. Another on the floor next to the sectional, tipped over, a puddle soaking into the hand-knotted rug.

The artisan bread Benji bought and staged perfectly has been torn apart and half of it is gone, crumbs across the cutting board, the counter, the marble floor. Someone was hungry and had no interest in the serrated knife six inches from the loaf.

And on the cream sectional, wrapped in the cashmere throw that Benji folded carefully and placed at the arm yesterday is a man. Black hair past his ears, stubble that’s almost a beard, wearing a black t-shirt that’s ridden up over his stomach. Jeans and scuffed boots, one foot on the cushion, one hanging off with the sole on the floor. He’s on his back with the throw bunched around his shoulders and is completely unconscious. He’s not small either. Six feet, maybe close to my height.

I quickly do an inventory of the potential damage. The sectional is an eight-thousand-dollar piece. The throw he’s wearing around his neck is cashmere and it’s visibly stained. The rug is hand-knotted and currently absorbing tequila. Three accent pillows are on the floor. Benji layered them on the sectional and now they’re on the floor because this man threw them off the couch so he could pass out on it.

I run up the stairs to check the other rooms and find them all empty. The only luggage is one duffel bag on the floor.

No broken windows, no jimmied lock. He had the code, which means he got it from someone who had it, and that’s a conversation I need to have with the property management company and possibly the seller.

I only have four hours.

Four hours to re-stage this room, replace the hydrangeas, air out the weed smell, clean the rug, get this man, his bottles, and his dirty boots out of this house, and make it look like none of this happened.

Four hours before the brokers arrive to assess me and the house.

Four hours before they decide whether I’m someone they want to do business with on this coast.

I call Benji. Third ring, his voice comes through thick with sleep.

“It’s six in the morning, Dante.”

“Someone is in the listing.”

He’s awake instantly and I hear the sheets move. “What do you mean, someone’s in the listing? In the beach house?”

“There’s a man asleep on the sectional. Staging is destroyed. The house smells like a rave and the brokers are here at ten.”

“Did you call the police? Dante, please tell me you at least called someone.”

“No.”

“Do you want me to come now? I can be dressed in five minutes, I can bring Mickey, he’s right here—” he asks.

“Absolutely not. No police. Not even Mickey. A police report at this address shows up on every search engine for the next five years and the listing is finished.”