When my husband demanded I sell my late grandma’s house to buy a luxury lake home for his mother, I agreed — but only on one shocking condition. And when we all sat down to dinner, I gave my husband and his mother the wake-up call they desperately needed. My name is Emily, and when I was just a little girl, my mother died.
It was just awful, and it left me with a gaping hole in my life. But my grandmother, Evelyn, stepped right in and raised me in her little house.
That house wasn’t luxurious, but it sometimes felt like every good memory I had was held there, in the branches of the gnarled pear tree, or the smell of pancakes in the summer kitchen. Six months ago, Grandma Evelyn passed away, and it broke my heart all over again.
The one bright spot, if you could call it that, was that she left the house to me.
It was everything she had in the world, the only thing of any real value, and I promise you, I never planned to sell it. Not ever. My husband, Jason, and I were renting a small apartment in the city.
We were saving up, dreaming of the day we’d have our own home. I was heartsore about Grandma’s death, and I wasn’t entirely sure I was emotionally ready to move back into that house yet. But it seemed like the perfect solution to our housing problem.
“We just need to figure out the logistics of traveling to the city for work,” I muttered to myself one evening.
“We can start a family there… it will be perfect.”
That’s what I was thinking until the evening that Jason proposed something so unexpected, my jaw almost hit the floor. Jason sat across from me on the sofa with a look on his face that I can only describe as anxiously calm.
My gut clenched a little because I knew that look meant something big (and probably bad) was coming.
“Listen, Em. We need to talk about your grandmother’s house.”
Oh, here we go, I thought, a little wave of dread washing over me. “I know.” I sighed and twirled the end of my ponytail in my fingers.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but everything still feels so fresh, you know?”
He shifted uncomfortably, then plunged ahead. “My mom wants to sell her house and buy a big house by the lake.”
I frowned, not seeing where this was going. “Here’s the thing.
If we sell your grandmother’s house, we can combine the money from both sales, and we can buy her that house. She deserves it.”
He finished the sentence with a kind of hopeful urgency, his eyes wide and earnest. I sat there completely stunned. “For your mom?” I finally managed to ask.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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