Priya had been right about everything, including the tedium.

A deed executed by an impostor conveys nothing; the chain of title had been broken by a forgery; the buyers — a young couple who had done nothing wrong and who had moved in and painted the second bedroom — were made whole by the title insurer, who then sued everybody in sight, and who eventually recovered a substantial portion from the frozen account and from a settlement with the title agency whose closer had notarized eleven documents in one afternoon without checking a single one.

That closer, a woman named Bettina Ruel, lost her commission, her job, and eventually pled to a felony.

She had been paid nine hundred dollars.