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The House Was in Her Name
Paperback
Series: Before You Knew, Book 8
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Publisher: Nora Kessler
Pages: 218
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Three days after burying her husband, Noemi Vance receives a property tax notice addressed to a woman she has never heard of.
Claire Devereux.
The address is correct - 14 Lamboll Street, Charleston, South Carolina. The house Noemi has lived in for eight years. The house her husband Brett handled the closing on. The house she raised her life inside, baking cakes at dawn and trusting the man who said he'd take care of the boring stuff.
But according to the county assessor, this house does not belong to Brett or Noemi Vance. It belongs to Claire Devereux, through a Delaware LLC called Devereux Holdings.
Claire Devereux does not exist.
As Noemi digs into her dead husband's filing cabinet - the one she never opened, the one he always kept locked - she discovers that every significant asset of their nine-year marriage was held under a fictitious identity Brett created. The house. The car. The savings. A two-million-dollar life insurance policy. All in Claire's name. Brett's will leaves everything to Noemi, but legally, he owned nothing. The will is worthless.
The only person who knows the full architecture of the fraud is Oren Sharpe - Brett's college friend, his accountant, the man who built and maintained the Claire Devereux structure for over a decade. Oren offers to help Noemi handle the transition. He asks her not to involve a lawyer. He tells her these things take time. And every month, the fees he charges to the ghost account climb higher.
With the help of her fiercely loyal best friend Margaux, a meticulous attorney named Reggie Toussaint, and an insurance investigator who has heard every lie and found them all equally unimpressive, Noemi begins to dismantle the paper fortress her husband built around their life. But the deeper she goes, the more she realizes that Brett's system was not designed to steal from her. It was designed to protect her - from threats she never knew existed, in ways she never consented to, with a devotion that looks indistinguishable from control.
The House Was in Her Name is a novel about trust - the kind that holds a marriage together and the kind that holds assets in someone else's name. It is a story about what happens when the person who managed your life dies and you discover that the life itself was never in your name.
No guns. No chase scenes. No bodies in the basement. The weapons here are deeds, tax returns, insurance clauses, and the quiet violence of a signature on a document you never read. For readers who loved Gone Girl, The Last Thing He Told Me, and Verity.
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