through the front windshield. With luck, this would wind up being one of his last drives to his mother’s house.
* * *
“It’s a lovely home,” Maizie concluded after her tour of both floors, the three-car garage and the backyard.
She preferred to build up her own rapport with the house she was to sell, but many of her clients insisted on leading the tour. She’d noticed Keith had hung back a little after he’d unlocked the front door.
It was very evident he had no desire to be here.
Either that or Keith was reluctant about selling the house in the first place but found himself in a financial situation forcing him to take this path.
“How fast can you sell it?” he asked her abruptly the moment he saw that she had finished her initial inspection.
Maizie watched her newest client for a long moment, studying him before she finally replied.
“I’m afraid that all depends on the market, the price of the house, what you—”
“You do it,” he said abruptly.
“Do what, exactly?” Maizie asked. He looked to be on edge. Why? she wondered. Did it have to do with the house or something else? There were a lot of gaps she would have to fill. It didn’t necessarily help with the sale of the house, but the information would be useful in other ways.
“You determine the going price for the house and sell it for just under that,” he explained.
“Under the going rate?” Maizie questioned. Why would he want to sell it short? This was one of the more popular models in the development, and its orientation was ideal. The morning sun hit the kitchen and family room first. By the time the afternoon arrived with its heat, the sun was hitting the driveway, leaving the house enveloped in comfort.
Maizie looked at her new client more closely. “What’s wrong with the house, Mr. O’Connell?”
“Nothing.” He had to hold himself in check to keep from snapping. That wasn’t going to help. Besides, it wasn’t Mrs. Sommers’s fault that closure felt as if it was eluding him. “There’s nothing wrong with the house. I just want to get rid of it. I told you, I don’t live in this area anymore, and I just want to sell the house and get back to my work.”
“What is it that you do, Mr. O’Connell?”
“I’m a lawyer.” Usually he experienced a tinge of pride accompanying that sentence. But this time there was nothing, just this odd, hollow feeling, as if being a lawyer didn’t matter anymore.
That was ridiculous. Of course it mattered. He was just fatigued, Keith insisted, silently scolding himself for the irrational thought.
“A lawyer,” Maizie repeated with an approving nod of her head, surprising him. “The son and daughter of one of my best friends are both lawyers,” she told him conversationally. And then she sobered slightly and she asked in as kind a tone as she could, “Did your mother die at home, by any chance?”
Because if the woman had, that put an impedance on the idea of a quick sale. Legally, at-home deaths had to be stated as such, and there were a great many people who wouldn’t dream of buying a home that supposedly came with its very own ghost to haunt its hallways.
Keith blinked. “What? No. Why?” The single-word sentences were fired out at her like bullets, shot one at a time.
Maizie’s tone continued to be kind as she answered him. “I thought that might explain why you seem so...tense,” she finally said for lack of a better word.
She didn’t want to offend the young man, but she did want to get to the heart of what might be troubling him, because he was troubled. Anyone could see that.
“Jet lag,” Keith told her dismissively, as if that explained everything.
“San Francisco is in the same time zone,” she pointed out gently. There was no reason for him to be experiencing any sort of jet lag.
“Of course it’s in the same time zone. I’m not an idiot,” Keith protested. “Sorry,” he murmured, doing his best to bank down his temper. Over the years, he’d schooled himself to be emotionally reserved. But what he’d learned was escaping him right now. “I was in New York on business when I got the call that—” Abruptly he changed the course of his response, correcting his last words. “My firm took a call from my mother’s neighbor saying that my mother had passed away. My assistant called me. So I caught the next plane back,” he told her.
And then he stopped cold.
Keith wasn’t accustomed to explaining himself. He hadn’t done that in a very long time. This had all caught him completely by surprise, and he was revealing more than he’d intended.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” he informed her stiffly.
“No,” she agreed, “it doesn’t. But I was just trying to get a feeling for the situation—and you. It helps me do a better job.” Maizie knew she had to sell this to the young man, who needed far more than the sale of this house to tie up loose ends.
He needed peace, she thought.
“I don’t care what you get for it. Just sell it,” Keith was saying. “I don’t want it hanging around my neck like the proverbial albatross.”
“You might not care about the sale price now, but you will someday soon. Perhaps even very soon.” Maizie paused, her sharp eyes sweeping over everything in the living room. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you planning on doing with the furnishings?”
“Furnishings?” Keith repeated uncomprehendingly.
“The furniture, the clothing in the closets, the books—”
He hadn’t even thought about that. He supposed he was still coming to grips with the idea that as far as his mother was concerned, there would be no more tomorrows and all that entailed.
Replaying the agent’s words in his head, Keith waved his hand, dismissing the problem. “Get rid of it. All of it.” The things she’d enumerated represented a place in his life he had no intention of revisiting. “Throw it all away.”
That would be a terrible waste, and Maizie wasn’t about to be wasteful if she could possibly help it. “I think if you do that, if you just throw all this away, you’ll live to regret it.”
He was already regretting this conversation. However, he told himself that it cost him nothing to hear her out. “All right. What do you suggest?”
Maizie thought of the conversation she’d just had yesterday with Theresa over a late lunch. It involved the daughter of a mutual friend.
The single daughter of a mutual friend.
A wide smile blossomed on Maizie’s lips. “I think I have an idea you just might like.”
“You
