26. Chapter 26
Dean
The prince finally got his answer. The indigestion cleared up.
I can’t sell the farm.
Owen called me two days ago about a potential buyer who’s been out to see the property twice. The second time, he brought a contractor with him. He assumed an offer would be coming through any time.
He was happy about it, as he should be. He was hired to do a job, and he did it well and quickly.
I should have been relieved, but all I felt was unsettled. And a lot of that irritating indigestion.
Then my mom called that afternoon while I was back in the hotel room.
“So, there’s a buyer?” she said, trying to tamp down her excitement, but I could hear it.
“Yes,” I told her.
She knew about the money. I told her when it officially went up for sale that whatever was made off the farm would be hers.
The part she wasn’t happy about was my plan to have my lawyer put it into a trust so she could use the money to supplement her income without Ed being able to empty the account.
Should I have just let her have it? Maybe. But I know how this goes. The first time Ed would need rescuing, she’d take the money out and hand it over. Eventually, there’d be nothing left. Protecting it was the only way I could make sure she’d still have something years from now.
“How long until it sells?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” I told her.
She sighed. “It’ll be weird that someone else will own the farm. It’s been in my life for longer than it hasn’t. I wonder what the new owners will do with the place?”
She was talking as if the deal was done.
“Probably tear it all down,” I told her, the words making me feel even worse. Imagining someone buying the farm, tearing everything down, and removing all the character my grandparents had put into it made me feel like I’d failed them somehow.
Living in a hotel was driving me crazy. Most of the in-person meetings I’d been having could have been handled via email. I had the same kinds of breakthroughs doing the video meetings while taking care of Rosie that first week. Being there in person wasn’t producing any better results.
Eating takeout and room service got old after two days, even in a city that has some of the best food in the world. I missed cooking for myself. I missed eating dinner with Rosie.
I even started looking at apartments. I looked around Boston since I already had a storage unit in Worcester. What I found were mostly sterile, overpriced boxes with no character.
I didn’t want that. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but the small-town appeal had grown on me.
I missed running on quiet roads that smelled like leaves and woodsmoke instead of busy streets where I had to dodge people and bags of trash that seemed like they’d been sitting out since July.
I missed waking up to birds and wind in the trees instead of sirens and traffic below my window.
The city offered me none of those things.
“I hope they don’t tear it down,” my mom said. “That would be sad.”
“Well, it’s a run-down house with a dead orchard and a partially burned barn,” I said. “I’m not sure what else someone would do with it.”
Rosie’s vision of the property had gone through my head then. The house painted white, the large kitchen, cozy couches and throw pillows. The new barn and orchard. It made the indigestion worse.
“You used to love that farm so much,” my mom said, a note of nostalgia in her voice that surprised me. “I remember how hard it was to pick you up, how much you’d cry about leaving.”
“Yeah,” I said, not really wanting to take a trip down memory lane right now.
“You’d tell me on the drive home that your grandma wanted you to have the farm someday,” she said.
“What?” I said, not sure I heard her right.
“Apparently, she told you someday the farm would be yours and you could live there.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “That wasn’t what she said.”
I remembered all the times I cried when I’d have to leave, not wanting to go, and she’d tell me maybe someday I could stay with her. It was a platitude, nothing more. Something a grandma says to a tearful grandson.
“Oh, no, you were very adamant,” my mom said. “Grandma had promised you the farm.”
This didn’t make any sense. The farm was always going to go to my mom. The will was changed after my grandma met Ed, so I could protect it. That’s what I was told.
But it wasn’t my grandma who told me that; it was my mom.
“Did she ever say anything like that to you?” I asked.
“About the farm? No,” she said. “Why would she?”
“But she told you she changed the will, right? The farm was supposed to be yours?”
She went quiet for a second. “You know, I don’t remember when she told me about the will.”
We said goodbye, and I hung up, but something about that answer kept bothering me.
I remembered how shocked my mom was when they read the will. She hadn’t known it was coming; she was just as confused as I was.
“She changed the will after she met Ed,” she’d said that day. “I can’t believe she did that.”
I needed to verify this information, though. I found the number for the estate planner in my email and gave him a call.
He wasn’t available, but I left a message.
Owen called me later that day with an offer on the property. I told him to give me twenty-four hours.
I heard from the estate planner the next day.
“Can you tell me when the will was changed?” I asked him.
“Changed?”
“Yes. In the original version, my mother was to inherit the farm.”
There was a pause on his end, and then the sound of papers shuffling. “Mr. Alden, this will was signed twenty years ago. There’s only ever been one.”
I thanked him and hung up and then sat there staring at the wall.
I was a thirteen-year-old kid when my grandparents made their will.
My grandma’s words, He’ll know what to do, had been sitting there for twenty years.
The farm was mine. The only home I’d ever known, and she had made sure I would always have it.
I’d thought she’d left me a problem to solve. Something to protect, sell, or somehow make right for my mom. But she hadn’t. She’d left me the farm because she wanted me to have it. Because somehow, even when I was thirteen, she knew how much that place meant to me.
I wasn’t expecting that to hit me so hard. I sit there for a minute, staring at nothing, grateful that I figured it out before it was too late.
I call Owen and tell him I won’t be accepting the offer and to take the FOR SALE sign down.
I know what to do now. I’m keeping the farm.
The decision comes with its own set of problems. I promised my mom the money from the sale, and I think I’ve figured out a way to keep that promise. I just need to iron out a few details before I tell her.
The other problem is, the place is a wreck. It’ll take some time and money to even get the place livable. Owen’s listing described it as “full of potential,” which is what you say about a house that used to be infested with raccoons.
But I’m up for the task, and maybe even excited about it.
And then the one thing that’s been haunting me. Keeping the farm means staying in one place. I’ve never done that. Not for very long, at least. But the nomadic life I’ve been living has never felt so old as it does now, after coming back to Manhattan from Autumn Ridge.
Maybe I’m finally ready to have somewhere to come home to.