He had made himself indispensable — around the house, in her days, in her plans for the future — and then, at just the right moment, a real estate agent had materialized to press her, gently and then not so gently, into selling her home.

The agent’s name, in Colette’s story, was also Stephanie.

And the buyer named on Colette’s old paperwork was the same man named on mine: Raymond.

I sat with the phone against my ear and felt the ground shift under everything.

This was not a boyfriend who had turned out to be a thief.

This was an operation.

A practiced, patient, repeatable machine that selected divorced and lonely and exhausted women, earned their trust over months, worked its way to their private documents, and then maneuvered them into signing away their homes.

Gregory was not a man who had stopped loving me.