Captain Morales wrote the dollar figure on her yellow pad and underlined it twice.

“Your father took out a six-figure loan against the house by forging your grandfather’s signature right as he was dying,” Dalton said.

I touched the silver ring on my thumb and slowly turned it.

The whole story my parents had fed me out on the back patio boiled down to a simple money transaction.

They hadn’t been kindly looking after my property while I was deployed overseas in a combat zone.

They hadn’t just been letting Chloe and Vance use the master bedroom to save up for a few months.