Outside the window the snow had stopped, and the light on the mountains was the color of an old bruise going green at the edges — the color, I would learn, of a thing beginning, very slowly, to heal.

Chapter 17 — The Preservation Order

The clock on the lien was the first thing we killed.

Rosalind knew a lawyer who knew the state’s financial-crimes division, and by the end of that week the pieces were moving in the one direction Desmond had never planned for: the lawful one.

A forged deed is not a strong instrument.

It only works if no one who knows the real signature ever looks at it — and I had looked, and now so had a forensic document examiner, whose report stated in careful professional language what I had known in my gut: the signature on the lien was not my father’s hand.