Entry #6-Momentum
I have always told myself that real estate is not about luck.
Luck is what lazy people call timing. Luck is what failed agents blame when they cannot close. Luck is a word used by people who do not understand that a sale is built out of small, unglamorous acts: returning calls, staging chairs, lying pleasantly about natural light, reading the fine print until your eyes burn, smiling at buyers who do not know what they want and sellers who think their house is worth more than God Himself would pay for it.
And yet.
And yet.
It has been three days since lunch with Plum, and everything has changed.
Not dramatically. Not in a way I could point to and name. If someone asked me to explain it, I would say the market shifted. I would say the stars aligned. I would say I had been pushing boulders uphill for so long that I did not recognize what it felt like when one finally rolled forward on its own.
My stalled deals closed.
All of them.
The Marlowe condo, which had been stuck in financing limbo for six weeks, cleared underwriting in a single afternoon. The buyers, who had been “thinking it over” since the inspection, called to say they were ready to move forward. No new concessions. No repair credits. No last-minute panic about the water stain on the ceiling. They simply said yes.
The Crenshaw short sale, which had been buried somewhere in a lender’s purgatory since winter, received approval out of nowhere. The bank sent the letter in the morning. By noon, the buyer’s agent had confirmed the funds. By three, everyone was signing.
The vacant lot on Ridgeview, which had fallen through twice, got a cash offer from an out-of-state buyer who did not ask for a survey and did not want to walk the land. He said he had seen enough pictures. He said he trusted the description.
I should have been suspicious.
Instead, I sat at my desk and watched my commission projections climb like a fever breaking.
My manager, Len, stopped by twice. The first time he knocked on my cubicle wall and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” The second time he leaned over and said, “You sure you didn’t make a deal with the devil?”
I laughed.
I laughed because that is what people say when they mean to be funny.
I laughed because I did not want him to see how hard the joke landed.
The Hollis estate closed cleanly.
That is the part I keep returning to, because it should not have been clean. It should have been messy. It should have been full of objections, inspections, addenda, requests for credits, arguments over fixtures, delays caused by old houses and older families. The Hollis estate should have been a disaster.
Instead, the money moved. The title passed. The signatures gathered. The deed transferred.
Plum bought the house site unseen.
I still cannot write that sentence without feeling something cold move through me.
Site unseen.
No walkthrough. No inspection. No structural engineer. No contractor crawling under the porch with a flashlight. No buyer standing in the ballroom and asking what that smell was, or why the floor bowed near the east wall, or whether the blackened wax on the mantel meant anything.
No one asked about the salt circle.
No one asked about the herbs hanging from the chandelier.
No one asked about the candles.
I did not mention them.
I tell myself there was no reason to mention them. The house was sold as-is. Plum had waived inspections. The seller’s attorney wanted the file closed, not reopened. The property had been vacant long enough for trespassers to get inside. Old houses attract strange behavior. Teenagers. Squatters. People who like to play at being frightening because they have never been frightened for real.
That is what I told myself.
I did not tell anyone that the salt circle had been too perfect.
I did not tell anyone that there had been no footprints inside it.
I did not tell anyone that the house had felt occupied, or that I had stood in the foyer with my flashlight shaking in my hand and known, in the stupid animal part of my brain, that something upstairs had been looking down at me.
I did not mention any of it.
Not to the seller’s attorney.
Not to Len.
Not to Plum.
Plum, who had bought the house without seeing it.
Plum, who had said, I know the house.
I keep thinking about that phrase. Not because it was strange—though it was strange—but because I let it pass. I let it pass the way you let a crack in the foundation pass during a walkthrough because the kitchen has good bones and the buyers are already in love.
You see the problem.
You make a note to worry about it later.
Later never comes.
Today, Sloane Keller got food poisoning.
I need to write that down carefully, because even now I can hear how it sounds.
Sloane Keller is the top producer at our brokerage, if by “top producer” you mean the person who takes credit for everything and leaves the paperwork for assistants. She has better clothes than me. Better teeth than me. A husband who works in private equity and somehow makes every conversation about him even when he is not present. Sloane has been circling the Aldrich commercial listing for months. The Aldrich family owns a row of mixed-use buildings near the river, and the exclusive listing would have made her quarter.
This morning, she was supposed to present.
I was supposed to sit in the back and take notes, because Len likes “team coverage,” which means he likes having someone junior present in case someone senior needs to pretend they are too important to attend.
Sloane never made it.
She called at seven-fifteen, voice wet and ruined, saying she had been up all night. Food poisoning. Oysters, she thought. She had gone to that new raw bar downtown with her husband. She said the word hospital twice, then corrected herself both times.
Len asked if I could step in.
I said yes before he finished the sentence.
I told myself I was being professional.
I told myself I had prepared the comps anyway. I had walked the buildings last month when Sloane made me come along to carry brochures. I knew the lease terms. I knew the roof history. I knew which tenant was late and which one had threatened to sue over mold. I knew the Aldrich brother wanted out and the sister did not.
I walked into that conference room and gave the pitch of my life.
Not because I was brilliant. Because I was hungry. Because I had spent years watching other people take what I wanted while I waited politely for permission. Because I knew, in my bones, what desperate sellers needed to hear: not flattery, not projections, but the quiet promise that someone else would take the problem off their hands and make it look clean.
They gave us the listing.
Len shook my hand.
The Aldrich sister looked at me and said, “You understand urgency.”
I said, “I do.”
I meant it in a way she probably did not intend.
When I got back to the office, Sloane had gone home. Someone said she had been pale and shaking in the parking lot. Someone else said her husband had taken her to urgent care. Someone else said it was probably just a bad oyster.
Just a bad oyster.
I sat at my desk and stared at my screen until the words blurred.
I should have felt worse.
Sloane is not my friend. She has taken commissions from me. She has talked over me in meetings. She once introduced me to a client as “one of our support agents” while I was holding the comparative market analysis I had built from scratch. I have every reason to dislike her.
But I did not wish her ill.
I did not wish her ill in any specific way.
I only wanted her out of the room.
And then she was.
That is all.
People get sick. People miss meetings. Deals close. Deals fall apart. The market moves in ways no one can fully predict. If I start seeing patterns in every coincidence, I will end up like the sellers who refuse to close on a full moon or the buyers who back out because a house number adds up to something unlucky.
I am not that kind of woman.
I am practical.
I am tired.
I am finally making money.
Tonight, for the first time in months, I paid every bill on my desk. Not some. Not the ones with the red notices. All of them. I logged into my bank account afterward and just looked at the balance. It was not wealth. It was not safety. But it was air.
I could breathe.
I kept touching my grandmother’s locket while I did it.
The red thread charm from Plum is not on me yet. That comes later. I am writing this in order, because if I do not write it in order, I will start pretending certain things happened after other things, and I cannot afford that luxury anymore.
For now, all I know is this:
The Hollis estate closed.
My deals revived.
Sloane got sick.
I stepped into her place.
And when I lay down tonight, I did not pray.
I thanked the market.
That is what I called it.
The market.
As if it were something with hands.