My niece was the child everyone protected, so when she asked me to guarantee the lease on her salon, I said yes. Eleven months later the salon closed, and the landlord came after me for twenty-six thousand dollars. I sold my house, moved into a small apartment, and waited more than a year before asking her to help with anything. When I finally did, she told me that a failed business wasn’t her problem and that at my age I should be grateful I still had anything worth taking. She expected me to cry. I didn’t.
I went back through the lease that night because something about her answer bothered me. The guarantee didn’t end when the salon closed. It stayed active until the landlord formally released me, and there was another clause she’d never mentioned about personal indemnity. I called the landlord’s office and asked who had signed the original paperwork. He gave me my niece’s name, then said there was a second document attached to it. My name was on that one too, but I had never seen it.
Three weeks ago the landlord’s new solicitor reviewed the entire file. He found that the person who actually owed the money wasn’t my niece at all. Her business partner had transferred the remaining lease obligations into a new company months before the salon closed, and the agreement named the original guarantor only if the transfer was properly disclosed. It wasn’t. On Tuesday morning, her business partner was called into the office and shown the paperwork. The person listed as personally responsible for the twenty-six thousand dollars wasn’t me. It was the woman who had told me I’d be lucky to have anything left.
