Dear Anlaby Road,
Sorry about the garage window. That was me, on the morning the first agent came through, letting the door slam while we shoved a mattress out of camera range, then taping cardboard over the crack before her car was even in the driveway. I told her about it before she'd got her shoes off. Seemed easier than pretending.
You've had more strangers through you this month than any month before. The first agent, walking your grounds and giving us a number that made the whole thing suddenly real. Someone measuring your deck at fifty metres and telling us to expect a "deadline sale," like that's a normal thing to call a house. The second, offering us the Wall Street Journal as part of a marketing package and admitting, once pressed, that none of his own listings had ever actually run there. And right at the end of the month, The third, who wouldn't give us a figure just to win the job and told us plainly that the other agent's cocky, dinosaur-riding marketing videos weren't going to land with the people who'd actually buy you.
We went to market on you once already, back before Christmas, and a builder's report did real damage: a tomato-plant stain on the ceiling read as mould, a hairline crack read as structural, and two buyers who'd genuinely wanted you went cold for reasons that had nothing to do with either. So for weeks the real question underneath every agent's pitch wasn't which one to hire, it was whether to sell you at all or hang on, rent you out, and wait the market. We went back and forth on it for longer than I'd like to admit, comparing painting quotes that didn't agree with each other by a mile, weighing whether the new mortgage would even survive renting you instead of selling you.
Then mid-month Jas was suddenly looking for her next job, and the arithmetic simplified itself in about ninety seconds. She took the call standing in the kitchen with the kids frying noodles behind her, and what I keep from it is that she was still telling me she was proud of me while her own week was going out from under her, in the same breath, without appearing to notice she was doing it. That same evening Dot beat me at Monopoly in your lounge for the first time in the history of the house, and did a lap round the room with a fistful of money that wasn't real, while the rest of us tried to work out how to live on money that was.
By the end of the month we'd landed, reluctantly, on letting you go, on the strength of one thing that last agent said that I haven't put down since: you have to have a small amount of vicious hope. I don't fully know what she meant by it. I know it's how the month felt inside you. Not confident. Not despairing. Hopeful, with teeth in it.
