Because of one thing
none of them had ever bothered to think about.
Six years ago, when we bought that house, my father — Ed, a man who spent thirty years in real estate and raised me to read every document before I signed it — had sat me down.
“Put the deed in your name, Kimmy,” he’d said. “Not because I don’t trust your husband. Because a house is the one thing a woman should never sign away on a promise.”
I’d listened.
I made the down payment from the account my dad helped me build.
I was the one who handled the closing, the title, the mortgage, every boring piece of paper Jarrod couldn’t be bothered to read — because “that’s your thing, babe.”
The house was not ours.
The house was mine.
Solely, legally, entirely mine.
And Jarrod had just promised his mother something he had never, for one single day, owned.
