Chapter 2 — Ten Minutes Earlier

Ten minutes before I hit that floor, I was standing at our kitchen island with a pen in front of me and my late father’s deed beside it.

“Sign it,” Derek said.

He had already filled in the property transfer documents himself.

My father’s small brick house — the one he had renovated with his own two hands, board by board, over the last decade of his life, the one he had left to me and me alone — would become, with my signature, jointly owned by Derek and me.

I pushed the papers back across the marble.