On paper, Nora, four months ago, you willingly signed this house over to Julian’s private lending company as collateral for a two-hundred-thousand-dollar business loan.” I will not lay out the mechanics of the forgery any more precisely than that, because a recipe for stealing a person’s home with their own paperwork is not a thing that belongs on a page.

It is enough to understand what they had done: they had taken a real signature I had given, in good faith, for one lawful purpose, and welded it onto a lie.

The betrayal inside that forgery cut deeper than the forgery itself, and I want to be honest about it, because it is the part that still aches.

When I signed that power of attorney before I left for Singapore, I signed it in trust.

My father had just died.