04
Marvin's reply came back: 【You've watched too many of those cheesy dramas. Your head's not right anymore. Go sign the contract with him first thing tomorrow.】
I stared at those words and, out of nowhere, I laughed.
I realized that in all of this, in the end, I stood completely alone.
After the hurt and the grief passed, I decided to look into Ryan McClain myself. And to look into him, I first had to keep him calm.
I texted him that I could reconsider renting him the place.
Ryan sent back a smug little emoji, as if he'd known all along that I would cave.
When I brought Tracey home, her mood was low too. I noticed it and asked her about it, and she finally stammered it out. "The kids at school say my mommy is a person who doesn't keep her word. A lot of them won't play with me anymore."
Seeing the tears about to spill from Tracey's eyes, I pulled her into my arms. I truly never imagined this thing could reach her too.
I comforted her, but I honestly couldn't find anything better to say. All I could tell her was that I would fix this as soon as I could.
On the way back I thought about a lot of things. The only people I had left to lean on now were probably my parents.
I decided to send Tracey to my mom and dad's first, so I could throw myself fully into digging into Ryan.
My mom saw the state I was in and only said she would take good care of Tracey.
That night when I got back I didn't even eat dinner. I started digging into Ryan right away, and it was a good thing I did, because I actually turned something up. This Ryan didn't just have no son. His wife had been reported missing two years ago, and there was no property, no car under his name.
By the time I'd gotten that far, I honestly had no idea what Ryan's real reason for renting my place could be.
I was just wishing the floating text would give me another hint, and the harder I wished for it, the more it delivered. The text really did appear.
【Ryan's whole reason for renting the place was never to live in it. It's to hide a body.】
【He isn't renovating your unit. He's building a hidden chamber, sealing it up inside a false wall.】
That line left me staring, dumbstruck. How on earth had he thought of this.
That night I didn't sleep well, and I didn't rush to reach out to Ryan either. Ryan got impatient and took me straight to court.
I received the court summons, and before long the court held its first hearing.
Ryan produced no small amount of evidence. His deposit transfer to me was genuine and valid, our verbal rental agreement was indirectly backed up by the property management office, I had no legitimate grounds to break the contract, and all I had was an empty "floating-text warning" that couldn't stand as evidence.
The case wasn't hard to decide at all. The judge ruled on the spot: a rental agreement had been formed between us, I had unilaterally breached it, I had to pay double the deposit, forty thousand, and I was required to keep performing the five-year lease.
Which meant I was looking at paying out money and still being bound to carry out the rental agreement.
After all this blew up, I became, in the eyes of my neighbors and my coworkers, a woman with no heart, no honor, and no decency.
Of course I wasn't going to sit there and wait for it to happen. They didn't believe my floating-text prophecy, but I said it out loud anyway. "The reason I won't rent to him is that he isn't renting the place for his son's wedding at all. Two years from now he'll give up the unit, and during the renovation he'll have hidden a body inside my home. Once he moves out, I'll be the one on the hook for murder."
The judge shot back at me right there. "And who exactly is this body he's hiding?"
The question stumped me. I couldn't answer it, and I had no solid evidence to get the police to investigate him either.
Just as I was turning it over and over with no way through, the floating text suddenly appeared again.
