It is a person reaching into your life and signing your name to a debt you never agreed to carry, and then counting on your trust, or your fear, to keep you from ever checking the page.

People imagine forgery as a dramatic crime, a master at a desk with a magnifying glass and a practiced flourish, and sometimes it is.

But far more often it is mundane and domestic and quiet, a hand you have held reproducing a signature it has watched you make a thousand times, on a document kept in a drawer in a house you share, protected by nothing more elaborate than the assumption that you will never have reason to look.

That assumption is the whole of the security.