Chapter 29: The Dreamhouse
The restaurant sat at the western edge of Dumphrey, where the busy streets thinned out into wide clean roads and the buildings started wearing glass instead of concrete. It was the kind of place with its name written small, because everyone who mattered was supposed to already know it.
Grandhurst.
Warm gold light spilled over dark wood, a pianist played somewhere Theo couldn’t see, and every table wore a white cloth ironed flat enough to cut bread on.
Theo stood at the entrance in his hoodie, his slightly baggy jeans, and his legendary Hikey sneakers, Jupiter Lady Edition.
The host looked at him how a man looks at a stain he hasn’t decided how to clean yet.
"Reservation, sir?"
"I’m here for Mr Billy," Theo said. "Billy Jean."
The host’s polite smile stayed polite, but something behind it went to work, sorting Theo into a category and not a flattering one. In fact, the man had already half-turned to explain that deliveries went round the back when a voice called out across the room.
"Lord Theo! Over here, over here."
Billy came weaving between the tables with both hands raised, and the host’s whole face rearranged itself in real time. Theo watched it happen and felt a little tired.
’I really wish he’d stop with the Lord thing...’
"Please," Theo said as they shook hands, "just Theo is fine."
"Of course, of course," Billy said, which was what he said the last time.
There were two people already seated at the table. One was a lean man in a grey suit with a leather folder open in front of him and a pen resting across it like he’d been waiting a while and didn’t mind. The other was a woman in a cream blazer, hair pinned up, a tablet propped against a bottle of sparkling water. Every ring on her hand cost more than the rings Theo had bought for his three wives put together.
Billy did the introductions.
"This is Mr Sarn, the lawyer I mentioned. Very good, very careful. And this is Ms Harcourt, from Grandhurst Realty. She handles the properties most people never even hear are for sale."
Mr Sarn nodded once and said nothing, which Theo decided he liked.
Ms Harcourt smiled with her mouth. Her eyes went to the hoodie, to the sneakers, and came back up.
"A pleasure," she said, and then, to Billy, not to Theo, "Is your client’s, ah, principal joining us? Or is this the assistant?"
For a moment nobody corrected her.
"This is the buyer," Billy said, a little too fast. "Mr Theolyne."
"Wonderful," said Ms Harcourt, in the tone people use when it is not wonderful at all. She slid the tablet a couple of inches toward Theo, then thought better of it and kept her hand near the edge.
Theo sat. He took the water Billy poured him and set it down without drinking.
"So," he said. "Billy told you what I’m looking for?"
"He told me some things." Ms Harcourt folded her hands. "I’ll be honest with you, Mr Theolyne, because I think honesty saves everyone’s afternoon. The kind of property you described is not a starter home. Remote acreage, four bedrooms, private lake frontage. That is a serious budget. Before we drive an hour out of the city, I like to make sure we’re all standing on the same ground."
’She thinks I wandered in off the street.’
He wasn’t offended, exactly. He’d have thought the same thing, looking at himself.
"That’s fair," Theo said. "Ask what you need to."
She hadn’t expected that, and it threw her half a beat off her rhythm. She recovered.
"Very well. The property I have in mind is listed at one point six million. The sellers are firm. There is no financing arrangement, no staged payment. It is cash, or it is a waste of a beautiful drive."
She said the number and then waited, watching his face, ready to be gentle about it.
Theo reached into his hoodie pocket and put the black card on the white cloth.
He didn’t do it to make a point. He did it because it was the fastest way to end this part of the conversation, and there were only so many hours in a day and he wanted to spend them at the hospital.
But the card sat there catching the gold light with its little embossed mark, and across the table Ms Harcourt looked at it, and looked at the hoodie, and looked at the card again, and Theo watched a whole afternoon’s worth of assumptions quietly fall over inside her.
Mr Sarn, the lawyer, allowed himself the smallest smile at the edge of his folder.
"That answers that."
"It does," the words came from Ms Harcourt, in a completely different voice.
Billy, who had already been through his own version of this at the bank, just poured himself more water and looked pleased.
They got down to it after that. Ms Harcourt turned the tablet around properly this time and walked Theo through the listing, and it was, he had to admit, close to exactly what he’d asked Billy for.
The house sat on the far shore of Lake Merrin, a good forty minutes past the western checkpoint, screened off from the road by a long run of trees. And was even five bedrooms. A wide porch that looked straight out over the water, so that the lake was the first thing you saw with your coffee and the last thing before the dark.
"The owner before was awakened," Ms Harcourt informed them. "A reinforcement-type, retired now, moved out to the coast. Which brings me to the strange part of your request, Mr Theolyne, and I’ll confess it stopped me when Mr Billy passed it along." She tapped the screen. "You asked for a large underground space."
"I did," Theo said.
"Most buyers ask me to hide the basement." A real smile formed on her face now. "This one you cannot hide. He built a sublevel under the whole footprint of the house and then some. Reinforced walls, poured deep, meant to take a hit and give nothing back. He used it as a private training hall. It is, frankly, overbuilt for a home, and it has scared off three buyers who did not know what to do with a bunker in their garden."
’A reinforced hall, underground, out where nobody drives past...’
Theo kept his face plain, but something in his chest settled into place with a quiet click.
Because it wasn’t a bunker in a garden to him. It was somewhere Sesan’s blocked lair might one day open again without the whole street watching.
It was walls thick enough that if Estea’s temper ever went past glaring at people, the house above would still be standing.
It was a place to bring Thall home to, away from a hospital where anyone with money and a grudge could hire a man for three thousand an hour and walk in the front door.
Somebody had, after all, already tried to leave his wives sick in the dark to die. He hadn’t forgotten that for a single hour since.
Then the moment passed, and he was just a man in a hoodie again, nodding at a tablet.
"I’d like to see it," Theo said.
Mr Sarn spoke up for the first time in a while, sliding two stapled documents across the cloth. "Before you fall in love with the porch. The title is clean, the reinforcement work is permitted and signed off, and the lake frontage is private, not shared, which matters more than it sounds. One thing." He tapped a line. "There is a utility easement along the eastern tree line. Nothing sinister. But if you ever wall the property, you leave that strip. I would not sign without understanding it."
"Thank you," Theo said, and meant it. He read the line twice, the way his father had taught him to read anything with a signature under it, then set it down. "That’s fine."
Ms Harcourt was already reaching for her keys.
The drive out was long and green and mostly quiet, the city falling away behind them until it was just a smudge of towers in the mirror. When they came through the last of the trees and the house showed itself against the flat silver of Lake Merrin, even Theo, who had trained himself not to want things, felt the wanting anyway.
They walked the porch. They walked the sitting room area, the dining, kitchen, even the dedicated office, and the bedrooms, which were plain and good and full of afternoon light. And then Ms Harcourt led them to a broad steel door set into the ground, worked the lock, and took them down.
The sublevel opened up beneath them far wider than the house above, a single vast reinforced room, cool and dim and dead silent, the kind of quiet that ate sound whole. Their footsteps didn’t echo. The walls simply drank them.
Theo stood in the middle of it and turned in a slow circle, and for once the interiority didn’t crack a joke.
’Yes... this will be more than enough.’
"I’ll take it," he said.