And beneath it, in the witness line, was another name I knew as well as my own. Thessaly Steadwell. My mother had witnessed a signature I never made.

That was the detail that undid me — not my father’s fraud, which was almost expected, but my mother’s name on the witness line.

Because a forgery needs a forger, but a witnessed forgery needs an accomplice who looks you in the eye.

My mother had not simply known.

She had signed.

She had sat at a table with a pen and attested, under her own name, that she had watched her daughter sign a document her daughter never touched — had lent her own signature, her own word, to the lie, to make it convincing enough to steal my company.