The address matched.

It was my mother’s lake property, the small place she had left me, the one piece of the world that had come down to me through my own blood and not through my marriage.

My mother bought that lake place with money she had saved a dollar at a time, and she left it to me and to no one else, and in all the years of my marriage I had thought of it as the one thing that was simply, uncomplicatedly mine — not ours, not the household’s, not a thing to be managed or merged or decided about at a dinner table, but mine, the way a name is yours.

To find my own signature standing under a stranger’s purpose on a page about that property was like finding a footprint in a room I had believed only I had the key to.