Presley had built an online congregation of fourteen thousand strangers who believed her life consisted of alpine sunrises and serene productivity. In reality, she rarely left her Egyptian cotton sheets before eleven.
“Selling,” I repeated.
The word felt like stone in my mouth.
“The market in the county is peaking,” Yvonne stated smoothly, adjusting the collar of her silk blouse. She was fifty-seven, a licensed real estate broker, and considered sentimentality a character flaw. “Curt and I found a stunning new build in Asheville. Three actual bedrooms, a proper open floor plan. It’s significantly more practical for our lifestyle.” TourProperties
She pushed the listing toward me. “You can crash on a friend’s couch while escrow closes. Sixty days. Maybe less, if we get an all-cash buyer.”
I stood frozen on the floorboards.
Behind me stretched a hallway covered in pale yellow floral wallpaper, unchanged since the late 1970s.
My grandmother had chosen it.
Her name was Evelyn Summers, and she had lived, worked, and struggled inside this farmhouse on Mill Creek Road in Ashgrove, North Carolina, for forty-one years.
Nana Evelyn planted the towering southern magnolia beside the front porch. In the sweltering July of 1988, she knelt with a rented industrial sander and tins of linseed oil to restore the original wide-plank pine floors.
