Chapter Five

Two mornings later, Isabella sat at the kitchen counter in Clara's villa with a cup of coffee going cold in front of her.

She had slept well for the first time in two years. No location app. No footsteps above her. No car in the drive that she had to run to the window to check.

She was thinking about the harbor when the golden script arrived.

It hung over the counter, thin and gold, and this time it did not flicker.

Chapter one hundred and eighty. The western swamplands. Dismissed as worthless for forty years. A consortium buys the deeds quietly, holds them for three years, and builds the wealthiest trade harbor on the eastern seaboard.

Isabella set down her cup.

She read it twice. Then a third time. The script did not say who the consortium was. It did not give a date. It only said the land was worthless until it was not.

Clara came in from the garden with dirt on her hands.

"You are up early," Clara said.

"I need to ask you something."

"Ask."

"What do you know about the western swamplands?"

Clara stopped at the sink and turned around. "The swamplands? Nothing. Nobody knows anything about them. My father calls them a mosquito farm." She turned on the tap. "Why?"

"I want to buy them."

Clara turned off the tap. Water dripped into the sink while she looked at Isabella.

"You want to buy a swamp."

"Yes."

"With what money?"

"Mine." Isabella folded her hands on the counter. "I saved for two years. The household allowance he never asked about, and what my mother gave me before the wedding. It is not a fortune, but it is enough for land nobody wants."

Clara dried her hands slowly. "Why the swamplands? Of all the land in Aurelia, why that one?"

"Because it is the only land in Aurelia nobody is watching." Isabella looked at her. "I need one thing that is mine before anyone notices me. This is it."

Clara set the towel down. "You have never been to the west edge. It smells like rot out there. The road floods every winter."

"I know."

"You will be throwing your savings into mud."

"Then I will own mud." Isabella picked up her coffee. "I am going this morning. I only wanted to know if there was something about it I should know."

Clara looked at her for a long moment. Then she shook her head, not in refusal but in something close to wonder. "There is nothing to know. That is the whole point of the place." She paused. "Do you want me to come?"

"No." Isabella smiled at her. "I want to do the first thing alone.”

The taxi dropped her at the end of a road that had stopped being a road.

The driver looked at the mud ahead of him. Then he looked at her. "You want me to wait?"

"Yes, please."

He looked at the mud again. "I will wait one hour."

The air hit her before she had taken ten steps. Salt, rot, something green and thick that settled at the back of her throat. Reeds stood in the water to her left, tall and brown.

Gulls circled over a flat gray sheet of water to her right. A wooden sign leaned at the edge of the path, faded and half sunk in the ground, and it said WESTERN PARCEL, and beneath it a number she could not read.

She walked on. Her shoes sank and came up with mud on them. She did not stop.

A small building stood at the end of the path, gray and low, with a tin roof and one window. A man sat on the step outside it with a newspaper folded in his lap. He was sixty or so, with a lined face and a cap pushed back on his head. He looked up when her shadow fell across the paper.

"Morning," he said. "You are lost."

"I am not lost." Isabella stopped in front of him. "Are you the agent for the western parcels?"

He folded his newspaper slowly. "I am the man who keeps the keys, the papers, and the complaints. Nobody calls me an agent." He looked her up and down. "You are dressed too well to be here."

"I would like to buy the parcel."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed, short and flat, and shook his head. "No, you do not."

"I do."

"Miss." He stood up and dusted off his trousers. "I have been sitting on this land for eight years. Do you know how many people have come out here to look at it? Fifteen. Do you know how many bought it? None.

I will tell you why. There is nothing out here. It floods twice a year. You cannot build on it. You cannot farm it. You cannot put a road through it without spending more than the land is worth.

It is mud and mosquitoes, and the city will not run water to it for another twenty years." He folded his arms. "Whatever you are thinking, whatever a man in a suit told you about it, he was wrong."

Isabella looked past him at the water and the reeds and the flat gray sky.

"How much?" she asked.

He blinked. "You heard me?"

"I heard you. How much?"

He named a figure. It was smaller than she had expected. She reached into her bag and took out an envelope.

"There is a bank draft in here," she said. "It should cover the parcel, the fees, and the transfer. If anything is left over, put it toward the back taxes."

He stared at the envelope. He did not take it. "You are serious."

"I am serious."

"You are throwing your money away. I am telling you as the man who has watched fifteen people walk away from this mud. You will regret this."

"Then it will be my regret." She held the envelope out. "Please."

He took it slowly, the way a man takes something he expects to give back. He opened it. He looked inside, then at her face, then inside again.

He was quiet for a long time. Then he turned and went inside, and she heard drawers open and paper move. He came out with a folder, a pen, and a stamp.

"Sign here," he said. "And here. Initial this one."

She signed. Her name went onto the deed in the same small, neat hand that had gone onto the marriage certificate and the divorce papers, and she noticed that and did not care.

He blotted the ink, stamped the paper, and handed her a copy. "You own a hundred and four acres of mud," he said. "Congratulations."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome." He looked at her again, and this time there was something in his face that had not been there before. "Miss. One question."

"Yes."

"What do you see out there?"

Isabella looked at the water, the reeds, the flat gray sky, and the gulls.

"Deep water," she said.

He followed her eyes out past the reeds to the gray sheet beyond. "That is a swamp."

"Not for long." She put the deed in her bag. "Thank you for your time."

She walked back up the path through the mud with the deed in her bag and her shoes ruined. The driver was still waiting. The sky was still gray. She was the owner of a hundred and four acres of worthless land.

She smiled the whole way back to the villa.