I dialed the private cell of Mara Chen, the ruthlessly brilliant corporate attorney who had helped me draft them. She was the one who’d once looked me in the eye and told me to keep encrypted copies of everything.

“Mara,” I said when she answered. “I’m ready.”

I could hear her posture change through the phone. “For the domestic protective order?”

“For all of it.”

Within sixty minutes, Mara had contacted the regional lender underwriting my parents’ retirement home and formally withdrew my financial guarantee. By sunset, their mortgage approval collapsed like a house of cards.

Because they’d rushed to sign the builder’s contract in their desperation to secure the property, their fifty-five-thousand-dollar earnest money instantly became nonrefundable.