The occupant’s name was not mine. The inspector had written it in the margin because the woman who answered the door had told him that was her name. I asked the building department if there were any other permits connected to my address, and the girl said there were three. A roof repair in 2017, plumbing work in 2019, and the furnace replacement. All three listed me as the homeowner, but every one of them had a different occupant. I asked for the contractor’s name from 2019, and when she read it to me, I recognized it from a receipt I’d found among my husband’s papers.
I called the contractor and told him I was the homeowner. He said he remembered the job because the woman who hired him had insisted on paying in cash. She told him her husband had bought the house for her and that they were living there temporarily while renovations were finished. I asked what she looked like, and he described a woman about my age with dark hair and a scar near her chin. I knew exactly who he meant. She had been at my husband’s funeral. I’d never spoken to her, but I remembered her standing near the back doors and leaving before the service ended. I asked the contractor if she’d given him my number. He said no, but she’d given him an emergency contact number — and it was my husband’s old number.
I went back through the permits and found something I hadn’t noticed before. The 2019 inspection wasn’t the first time someone had used my house as an address. There was an electrical permit from 2004, filed under my name, with the same woman’s signature as the property contact. I called the county and asked them to pull the original. The clerk came back several minutes later and said the permit had been amended twice. The first amendment added an occupant. The second removed her. I asked who the occupant was. She read me the name, and I knew it immediately. It was the name my husband had whispered once when he thought I was asleep.
