Grandpa looked up, his eyes weary. “Optimization?”
“You are bleeding money on maintenance,” Derek said, chewing thoughtfully. “And the rents are archaic. I checked the comps in the area. You are charging the Vegas and the Millers about thirty percent less than market rate. If we adjust that and maybe cut back on the reactive repairs by switching to cheaper contractors, we could increase the net operating income significantly before the fiscal year ends. It would help with the estate taxes later.”
Later. He meant when you are dead.
I dropped my fork. It clattered against the china, loud and sharp. “He is not dead yet, Derek,” I snapped.
My mother Elaine shot me a look that could have frozen boiling water. “Ivy, please. Your brother is being practical. We have to think about the future.”
That was the word they used to beat me into submission: practical. In the Bennett household, being practical meant stripping away all human emotion until only the numbers remained. It was why I was the disappointment. I had dropped out of the business administration program at the state university three years prior. I could not do it. I could not sit in classes where professors taught us how to maximize profit by minimizing human dignity. I could not view employees as resources to be exploited or customers as wallets to be drained. I became a photographer because a camera lens forced you to see the truth. But to my mother, I was just Ivy the dreamer, Ivy the flake. Ivy who worked part-time and took pictures for catalogs and could not be trusted with real adult decisions.
“You need to be more like your brother,” Mom told me that night in the kitchen while I aggressively scrubbed the dishes. “Derek has a vision. He understands how the world works. You cannot pay bills with sentimentality, Ivy.”
So, I stopped arguing. I stopped trying to explain that maybe the reason the tenants stayed for ten years was because Grandpa didn’t raise the rent every time the wind blew. I retreated into the background, which was exactly where they wanted me. But while Derek was busy building spreadsheets and researching property management software, I was the one driving to Grandpa’s house every morning.
For four years, my life became a rhythm of caretaking. As the cancer ate away at his lungs, Grandpa’s world shrank to the size of his bedroom. I was the one who learned how to adjust the flow on his oxygen tank. I was the one who learned how to blend his food so he could swallow it without choking. I was the one who sat by his bed for hours, editing photos on my laptop while he slept, listening to the rasp of his breathing, terrified that each silence might be the last.
Derek visited, of course. He came on Sundays, dressed in his golf clothes or a sharp suit, checking his watch every ten minutes. He never brought food. He never offered to change the sheets. He brought documents. He would sit by the bed, open a file, and say things like, “Grandpa, I need you to sign this authorization for the bank.” Or, “Grandpa, I am thinking we should put the Elm Street house under an LLC to limit liability.”
Grandpa would sign, his hand shaking, his signature becoming a spiderweb of trembling ink. He was too tired to fight. He just wanted Derek to stop talking so he could rest.
But in the quiet hours after Derek had left to go play golf or meet a client, Grandpa would talk to me. He did not talk about money. He talked about the houses. He told me the history of every single floorboard.
“That house on Maple,” he whispered one afternoon, his voice thin as paper. “The basement floods if it rains for three days straight. You have to go down and check the sump pump. The switch gets stuck. You have to wiggle it.”
I grabbed my notebook. I wrote it down. Maple Street. Sump pump switch. Wiggle it.
“And the commercial unit,” he wheezed. “Where the cobbler is. The roof flashings are old. If snow piles up, it leaks into the back room. You have to get someone up there to clear it or it ruins Mr. Henderson’s leather stock.”
I wrote that down, too. Over the months, I filled three notebooks. I learned the names of every tenant. I learned which boiler needed to be coaxed on cold mornings and which neighbor complained if the grass wasn’t cut on a Thursday. I learned the heartbeat of the estate. Derek knew the market value of the buildings; I knew how to keep them standing.
One rainy afternoon about six months before the end, the atmosphere in the house changed. Derek had just left after a particularly aggressive pitch about selling two of the properties to fund a diversified investment portfolio. He had been loud, pushing hard, telling Grandpa that holding on to old real estate was financial suicide. Grandpa had closed his eyes and feigned sleep until Derek finally huffed and walked out. I was sitting in the armchair editing a photo of a wedding cake, trying to ignore the knot of anger in my stomach.
“Ivy,” Grandpa said. His voice was stronger than it had been all day.
I looked up. He was watching me. His eyes, usually clouded with pain and medication, were startlingly clear.
“He does not care about them,” Grandpa said.
I knew he wasn’t talking about the properties. He was talking about the people inside them.
“He cares about the legacy,” I said, parroting my mother’s favorite line. “He wants to make sure what you built lasts.”
Grandpa made a sound that was half laugh, half cough. “He wants the kingdom, Ivy. He does not want the crown. The crown is heavy. The crown hurts your neck. He just wants to sit on the throne and point.” He shifted in the bed, wincing as his bones settled against the mattress. I got up to adjust his pillows, but he waved me away.
“He came here today asking about the profit margins on the duplex again,” Grandpa said. “He asked me why I haven’t evicted Mrs. Vega. He said he could get five hundred dollars more a month from a young professional couple.”
Mrs. Vega. I felt the blood drain from my face. “Mrs. Vega brings you soup every Tuesday. She has lived there since I was in high school.”
“Exactly,” Grandpa said. “But to Derek, she is just an inefficiency. He looks at a home and sees a square footage number multiplied by a dollar sign. That is dangerous, Ivy. A landlord who does not see people is a tyrant, and tyrants eventually get overthrown.”
He fell silent for a long time. The only sound was the rhythmic hiss-click of the oxygen concentrator. I went back to my laptop, but I couldn’t focus. Then he asked me the question. It was a question so strange, so out of left field, that I thought perhaps the morphine was making him hallucinate.
“Ivy,” he said, “if a person in this family… if someone were to submit a piece of paper that wasn’t real… a fake document… what do you think would happen?”
I paused, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. “What do you mean, Grandpa? Like a forged check?”
“No,” he said slowly, staring at the ceiling. “Like a legal document. A will, or a power of attorney. If someone wanted something badly enough, and they thought nobody was looking, and they presented a lie as the truth to a court or a bank… what happens?”
I turned my chair to face him fully. “Grandpa, that is a felony. That is fraud. They would go to jail.”
He nodded, a tiny, almost imperceptible movement. “Yes, they would.”
“Why are you asking me that?” I asked, a cold chill running down my spine.
He turned his head and looked at me. There was a sadness in his gaze that broke my heart. But underneath the sadness, there was steel.
“Because, Ivy,” he said softly, “I need to know if you have the stomach for what comes next. Derek thinks he is playing a game of Monopoly. He thinks he can just roll the dice and buy everything. But real life has rules. And if you break the rules in the real world, you don’t just lose a turn. You lose everything.”
He reached out his hand and I took it. His skin was dry and cool.
“He wants to own,” Grandpa whispered. “But he doesn’t want to be responsible. That is his fatal flaw. And I am afraid, my dear, that he is going to prove it very soon.”
I did not know then what he meant. I thought he was speaking hypothetically. I thought he was just
