I had learned, the hardest way there is, that the two things belong in the very same document — that you can love someone with your whole heart and still build a legal wall around what you leave them, and that doing so is not distrust.

It is simply the last and most practical form love takes.

People in town still talk about the morning Greg Pruitt stood on my porch with a can of beer and informed me my home was no longer mine.

They remember the cruiser coming up the drive eleven minutes later.

And they remember, more than anything, the forged signature of a woman who had been three years in the ground.

I have made a kind of peace with being a story people tell, though it took a while.