Boring is the camouflage.” She smiled without warmth.

“I don’t get bored.” And then there was the document examiner — a quiet, precise woman who spent an afternoon with the deed and a set of my father’s genuine signatures under magnification, measuring pen-lifts and pressure and the tiny unconscious rhythms a hand makes that a forger, however skilled, can imitate but cannot inhabit.

Her report ran eleven pages to say what I had known in one glance at the bottom of a stairwell: this was not my father’s hand.

But eleven pages is what a court believes.

One glance is what a daughter believes.

I was learning the difference, and the difference was the whole game.