Mrs. Pike texted that the deputies had pulled up, that Heather was crying, and that a man in a suit was calling himself her lawyer, and I sat on a wooden bench in a church kitchen in Antigua and waited to hear whether a forged lockbox code and a loud lawyer could take a house that is only mine.
They could not. The Brunswick County deputies confirmed from the closing documents I sent that I paid cash for the cottage after Walter died, that my name is the only name on the deed, and that Heather has never lived there and had no permission to be inside.
Heather got in through the realtors lockbox using a code she pulled from Walters old email account, the one she still had the password to, and her lawyer had no standing at all, because you cannot represent a client into a house she does not own, no matter how nice the suit.
For eleven years, whenever Heather crossed a line, Walter said please, Linda, for me, let it go. Walter is gone, and I loved him, but his please was the reason Heather thought she could crib a code from his email and move a crib into my cottage.
The deputies gave Heather and Craig until the end of the day to take the crib and the moving truck and leave. The lawyer, once he heard the word deed and the word sole, folded his little folder and left first. Heather cried the whole time. I have watched Heather cry to get her way for eleven years. I stayed in Guatemala and finished serving breakfast.
When I got home Tuesday, I had the realtor remove the lockbox for real this time, standing over her while she did it, and I had Walters old email account closed for good. I re-keyed every door. And I sent Heather a letter, kind but final, telling her that I did not steal her fathers money, that his insurance and our house were legally mine, and that the next uninvited visit would be a trespass charge, not a family drama.
Mrs. Pike, eighty-one and nosy, God bless her, brought me a pie the day I got back. She said she never did trust that girl. Neither, at the end, did I.
How did she get in, the dispatcher asked. Through a dead mans email. But the cottage is the living womans, and I am the living woman, and I hung Walters photo over the mantel in a house that is mine, only mine, with the ocean out the window and no lockbox on the door.