Chapter 2

Then I set the pen back down.

"I'll read it tonight," I said. "I'll initial it in the morning, if it's clean."

Brett's smile didn't move, but something behind it did. "It's a formality."

"Then it'll survive me reading it." I closed the folder over his flagged tabs and laid my hand flat on top, and for one second the three of them — Brett, Lorraine, and Sienna in the doorway with an armful of lilies — looked at me the way you look at a lock that's stopped opening.

"Of course," Sienna said, into the quiet. She had a way of speaking for the room. "Della's so careful. That's why she does the boring parts." She set the lilies in Lorraine's good vase. "I brought the white ones. For the gala."

"Thank you, sweetheart," Lorraine said.

I took the folder upstairs, to the room I used as an office. We'd painted it yellow the first year, before we stopped talking about why.

The refinance was real. Two hundred thousand against the equipment line, a lender out of Columbus I didn't recognize, closing costs rolled in. The kind of paper a tired bookkeeper initials at a kitchen table without reading. I read all forty pages twice. On the surface it was clean.

It was the date that wasn't.

The package referenced an existing note. A prior loan, same lender, ninety days old, two hundred thousand, secured against the house — our house, the one in my name and Brett's. I had never seen it. I pulled up the bank portal, found it, opened the executed copy.

My signature was on it.

Not a copy of my signature. My signature, the real loops of it, the way I cross the second l in Marsh. Dated April third.

On April third I had been four hundred miles away, in a recliner in a clinic in Indianapolis, for a procedure I had not told this family about, because Lorraine would have found a way to make it my fault. I had the discharge papers. I had the toll records off my own car. I had a sister who'd driven me and a nurse who'd checked my ID against my face at eight that morning.

I had not signed anything in Ohio on April third. Someone had signed it for me, well enough to fool a notary who had never met me.

I sat very still, the way you sit when you understand the floor you're standing on is the trap.

My first instinct was the stairs. Go down, put the executed copy on the dining table, watch Brett's face. I got as far as standing up.

Then I sat back down, because I knew how that ended. He'd say I signed it. It was my house, my hand, a notary's stamp. Lorraine would say I'd been handling the money and look where that got us. And the second I tipped them — the second they knew I'd found it — the operating account would empty the rest of the way overnight, the Columbus lender would get a panicked call, and the file on the bank portal would quietly stop matching whatever they showed the auditors. I'd be a wife making accusations against her own signature, with no copies and no time.

I had an alibi. A clinic four hundred miles away, a sister, a nurse, toll records. But an alibi is only worth what you can lay on a table all at once, in front of someone who can't make it disappear. Right now it was scattered across three states and my own memory. Useless, until it wasn't.

A hundred and ninety-four thousand out of the operating account. Two hundred borrowed against my own house, in my own forged hand, ninety days back. And now a third loan they wanted me to initial for real — so that when the first one surfaced, there would be a pattern. A paper trail. A wife who signs whatever her husband sets in front of her. A reason for everyone to look at me.

My phone buzzed. The same bank hold I'd been chasing all week, except now it had a name on it. Account flagged for review pending borrower verification. Primary contact for outstanding personal guaranty: Della M. Halvorsen.

Not Brett. Not the company. Me.

I heard Walt before I saw him. The old dispatcher's truck has a fan belt I've been telling him to replace for two years. He was in the yard below my window, locking the gate for the night, sixty-four years old and doing the job Brett had told me last month we'd be "transitioning away from." Walt taught me how the trucks actually moved my first month here, when nobody else would give me the time. I'd made sure his hours never got cut, quietly, in the one column of the books I controlled.

He looked up, saw me in the window, and lifted two fingers off the gate latch. A wave. The only person on this property who waved at me.

I waved back.

Then I looked at the forged loan on my screen, and at the folder on my desk they wanted signed by morning, and I did the thing six years of chasing other people's fraud had trained into me before it trained anything else.

I started making copies.