My realtor, a woman I called a friend, was in the middle of our open house telling a hand-picked buyer all the reasons he should lowball us.
She was supposed to be getting us top dollar.
We’d trusted her with everything—the sale of our home, the key to our family’s entire future waiting for us in Portland.
The plan was to use our private inspection report as a weapon against us, leveraging our tight timeline to make us fold on a garbage offer so she could pocket both sides of the commission.
She just never counted on my neighbor’s dog having a small bladder, or my brother being a tech lawyer who knows exactly where to find digital fingerprints.
She thought she was setting a trap using my private documents, but she left behind a digital trail of her own greed, and I was about to print it out and hand-deliver her professional ruin in the middle of her big show.
The Weight of a Promise: A Box of Trust
The entire future of my family was packed into a stack of cardboard boxes labeled PORTLAND. My dream job, a lead landscape architect position redesigning the city’s waterfront, was waiting. My husband, Tom, had already lined up interviews. Our daughter, Maya, was tentatively excited about a new high school with a killer arts program. All that stood between us and that future was this house. Our house.
“It’s going to fly off the market,” Danae said, her voice echoing in our newly sparse living room. She tapped a perfectly manicured nail on the listing agreement. “Trust me.”
I wanted to trust her. Danae and I weren’t best friends, but we were solidly in the “wine-night-and-book-club” tier of suburban friendship. When she’d gotten her real estate license a few years ago, using her for our sale felt like a given. A way to support a friend while navigating the most stressful transaction of our lives.
“The timeline is just… tight,” I said, tracing the rim of a coffee mug. “We have to be out in sixty days. If the sale falls through, or gets delayed, we’re renting two places at once. We can’t swing that.”
Danae waved a dismissive hand, the charm bracelet on her wrist jingling. “Lark, stop worrying. The market is hot. Your house is gorgeous. This is a slam dunk. We’ll price it aggressively, get a feeding frenzy at the first open house, and you’ll be choosing from five over-asking offers by Sunday night.” Her confidence was a warm blanket, and I let myself pull it a little tighter. She was the professional. She knew best.
The Art of Staging
A week later, our home was no longer ours. It was a product, curated by Danae. She swept through like a director on a film set, pointing and dictating.
“All these personal photos have to go,” she announced, gesturing at the gallery wall of Maya growing up. “Buyers need to imagine their kids here, not yours.” I flinched, but I packed the frames away.
She ran a hand over the scuffed corner of the entryway wall, a barely-there mark from years of Tom’s work bag bumping against it. “We need to hide this. Buyers see one tiny flaw and they start imagining the whole house is falling apart. They’re looking for reasons to lowball you.”
Every comment felt like a tiny cut. My carefully tended succulent garden on the windowsill? “Too much clutter.” The worn, comfortable armchair where I read to Maya every night when she was little? “It looks dated. Let’s shove it in the garage.” It was all sound advice, I knew. It was just business. But as she systematically erased our life from the walls, a small, irritating buzz of resentment started humming under my skin. I chalked it up to the stress of the move.
The Inspection Report’s Shadow
To get ahead of any surprises, we paid for our own pre-listing inspection. The report came back mostly clean—the roof had another decade, the foundation was solid. The inspector noted the HVAC was original to the fifteen-year-old house and that a GFCI outlet in the guest bath needed replacing. Standard stuff.
I forwarded the PDF to Danae, feeling relieved. “Looks pretty good, right?” I wrote.
She called me an hour later, her tone dialed down from its usual peppy hum to a conspiratorial whisper. “Okay, so, that HVAC unit. That’s a potential flag,” she said. “A savvy buyer’s agent is going to see ‘original unit’ and immediately try to knock twenty grand off the price for a replacement.”
“But it works perfectly,” I argued. “We have it serviced twice a year.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “It’s about perception. We have to be very, very careful how we position this. Don’t worry, I’ll handle the narrative. We’ll disclose it, of course, but I’ll frame it as a well-maintained original part, not a looming expense.”
Her strategic framing felt a little slippery, but she was the expert. She was our friend. “Okay, Danae. We’re putting our trust in you.” I could almost hear her smile through the phone. It was the sound of a shark, I’d later realize, tasting blood in the water.
Whispers Before the Storm
The night before the open house, the house was silent and sterile, smelling of fresh paint and lemon cleaner. It looked like a stranger’s home. I wandered through the perfectly staged rooms, a ghost in my own life. My phone buzzed. It was Danae.
“Just wanted to call and say get a good night’s sleep!” she chirped. “Everything is set for a blockbuster tomorrow. The sign is up, the listing is getting crazy traffic online. I’ve even been doing some pre-marketing with a few interested parties.”
“Oh?” I asked, a little thrill of hope cutting through the anxiety. “Who?”
“Just some contacts. A guy whose sister is looking for a place in this exact neighborhood. I gave him a little sneak peek of the highlights. Building that buzz, you know?” she said breezily. “Get ready to pop the champagne, Lark. By this time tomorrow, you’ll be a rich woman.”
She hung up, leaving me standing in the dim light of the kitchen. The phrase “sneak peek of the highlights” snagged in my brain. It felt wrong, but I couldn’t articulate why. I pushed the feeling down. It was just nerves. It had to be. Tomorrow, everything would be fine.
The Cracks in the Facade: Open House Jitters
“Out,” Danae had commanded, shooing us toward the door like we were stray cats. “Go to a movie, get a long lunch. The absolute worst thing for a sale is having the sellers lurking around. It makes people uncomfortable.”
So we went to a cafe downtown. Tom tried to get me to eat a croissant. Maya scrolled through TikTok, blissfully oblivious. I nursed a cold cup of coffee, my leg bouncing under the table, my phone face-up next to my saucer. Every five minutes, I’d pick it up, check for notifications, and set it back down.
An hour in, a text from Danae finally came through. A photo of a small crowd milling on our front lawn. The caption read: ”Great turnout! Getting tons of buzz! :)”
A wave of relief washed over me so powerful it almost made me dizzy. I showed the picture to Tom. “See?” he said, squeezing my hand. “She knows what she’s doing. It’s all going to be okay.” For the first time all day, I let myself believe him. I took a bite of his croissant. It tasted like victory.
An Unexpected Text
Twenty minutes later, my phone buzzed again. It wasn’t Danae. It was my neighbor, Deb from two doors down. We weren’t close, just a friendly wave-and-chat-about-the-weather kind of relationship. The text felt out of place.
Deb: Hey Lark, weird question. I was just walking Baxter past your house. Is everything okay with the sale?
My stomach tightened. I typed back immediately.
Me: I think so! Why?
The three little dots appeared and disappeared for a full minute. My heart started hammering against my ribs.
Deb: Well, your agent was talking really loud in the kitchen with some guy. I was on the sidewalk and could hear her through the open window. She was going on and on about your old HVAC and the inspection report. Something about how you guys were ‘super motivated’ to sell fast.
The cafe suddenly felt hot and suffocating. The half-eaten croissant in my stomach turned to lead. Super motivated. The inspection report. I read the text again, then a third time, the words blurring into a nonsensical jumble of betrayal. Why? Why would she do that?
The Rabbit Hole
“What is it?” Tom asked, seeing the color drain from my face.
I handed him the phone. He read the text, his easygoing expression hardening into a frown. “That’s… weird,” he said. “Maybe Deb misheard her? Or took it out of context?”
“No,” I said, my voice flat. “No, she didn’t.” I knew it in my gut. That vague, unsettling feeling I’d had for the past week coalesced into a sharp, ugly certainty. Danae was not on our side. But the motive was a black hole. Why would a realtor sabotage her own listing?
Then, a cold, sickening thought surfaced. The commission. She gets three percent for selling our house. But if she also brings the buyer, she gets their three percent, too. Double-dipping. She wasn’t sabotaging the sale. She was steering it. She was trying to hand-pick our buyer.
“Give me your laptop,” I said to Tom. My voice was low, trembling with a fury that was just starting to wake up. He pulled it from his backpack without a word. I needed proof. I was going to find it.
Metadata and Malice
I logged into my email account, my fingers flying across the keyboard. I went straight to my sent folder and found the email I’d sent Danae with the inspection report PDF attached. “Here’s the report! Looks pretty good, right?” my cheerful, naive words mocked me.
I opened it, my mind racing. How could I prove she’d shared it? My brother was a tech lawyer. He’d once explained how digital files leave behind a trail, a set of fingerprints called metadata. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I started clicking, digging into the properties of the document in my own sent mail. It was a dead end.
Then I remembered the shared Google Drive folder Danae had set up for us to exchange documents—the listing agreement, the disclosure forms. I opened the drive. It was all there, neat and tidy. But on a hunch, I looked at the activity log. It showed who had accessed what, and when.
My breath caught in my throat. At 10:15 PM last night, Danae had uploaded a new document. A document she hadn’t shared with me. Its title was simple: “Buyer Agreement – K. Miller.” K. Miller. I didn’t know any K. Miller. But the activity log showed she had shared it with one other person. An email address I didn’t recognize. [email protected].
Greg. The name from Danae’s call. “A guy whose sister is looking…”
“Tom,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “We’re going back to the house. Right now.”
The Unveiling: The Digital Trail
Tom drove, his hands tight on the steering wheel, his jaw set. He kept glancing over at me, his face a mask of concern. Maya sat in the back, headphones on but her eyes darting between us, sensing the sudden, toxic shift in the car’s atmosphere. I barely noticed them. My entire world had shrunk to the glowing screen of the laptop.
I called my brother, Mark. I didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “I think my realtor is sabotaging my sale to get both sides of the commission. I need to find proof. Now.”
His voice was all business. “Okay, Lark. Did you send her anything sensitive as an attachment?”
“The inspection report,” I said, my voice hollow.
“Okay. She’d have to be an idiot to forward the actual email. But people get lazy. Check any shared cloud storage. Dropbox, Google Drive, anything. Look for hidden folders, weird file names. Look at the revision history and sharing permissions of every single document. She might have made a copy of the report and shared it from there. And Lark,” he added, his tone sharpening, “look for any kind of side agreement. A buyer’s agent contract. Anything with another person’s name on it.”
His words were a map. While Tom navigated traffic, I navigated the digital labyrinth Danae had created. The Google Drive folder. Buyer Agreement – K. Miller. The name clicked into place. K for sister, maybe. Miller, a different last name. But the person it was shared with… greg.petersen. Greg.
I clicked on the file. My access was denied. Of course it was. She wasn’t that stupid. But Google Drive has a back door for owners. I wasn’t an owner of that file, but I was an owner of the parent folder. I fiddled with the settings, changing my role, granting myself new permissions. The lock icon vanished. I clicked again. The document opened.
The Smoking Gun
It was a standard Buyer’s Representation Agreement between Danae, as the agent, and a Katherine Miller. My stomach clenched. But that wasn’t the smoking gun. It was a digital document, created through a service that tracks changes. I clicked on the document’s history. And there it was.
The service had logged a comment, an internal note from Danae to herself, time-stamped from last night. A note she must have forgotten to delete. “Confirm with Greg re: offer strategy. Come in 30k under ask, cite HVAC from report. They’re on a tight timeline & will fold. Commission split 60/40 as bonus.”
My vision swam. It was all there. The premeditation. The use of my private information as a weapon against me. The side deal for a kickback from her own client, who she was coaching to lowball me. It was so much worse than I’d imagined. This wasn’t just unethical; it was a calculated, malicious betrayal.
“Pull over,” I choked out. “Tom, pull over right now.”
He swerved into a gas station. I connected the laptop to my phone’s hotspot, my hands shaking so badly I could barely type my password. I logged into our home network and sent the document, along with a screenshot of the damning note, to our wireless printer. I needed a physical copy. I needed to hold the proof in my hand when I confronted her.
The Calm Before the Confrontation
We pulled up a block from our house. The street was lined with cars, a testament to Danae’s successful marketing and my home’s appeal, which made her treachery even more infuriating. She didn’t need to cheat. She was just greedy.
I could see her through the large picture window, holding court, laughing with a couple near the fireplace. My fireplace. My home. A cold, crystalline rage settled over me, pushing out the panic and the hurt. It was clarifying. I knew exactly what I had to do.
The printer notification popped up on my phone. The pages were waiting for me on the desk in my home office.
I turned to Tom and Maya. “I need you to wait here,” I said. My voice was steady, unnervingly so. “This is something I have to do myself.”
Tom started to object, but he saw the look in my eyes and stopped. He just nodded. “Be careful.”
I got out of the car, the screenshots folded neatly in my purse. Every step I took on that familiar sidewalk felt heavy, momentous. This was the last time I would walk into my house as a victim. I was about to set it all on fire.
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