My mother softened her voice into something meant to sound maternal.

“Just sign, Katya.

We can end this tonight, no public embarrassment.”

And I remembered my father in the hospital, two months before he died, his cold hand around mine.

He had known, by then, that the heart they were monitoring was not going to hold much longer, and he had used one of our last clear afternoons together not to reminisce but to warn me, the way a careful man leaves a map in a drawer for the people who will come after him.

“Your mother is going to try to take what’s yours,” he’d said.