Two officers arrived. One stayed outside while the other sat across from me at the kitchen table. She asked what had happened and waited through the places where my voice stopped working.
When she asked whether I wanted the assault documented, I looked at the photographs of Marcus on the refrigerator.
“Yes,” I said. “All of it.”
My neighbor Ruth stood at the open doorway after the officer called her over. She had been watering the ferns on her porch. She had heard the threat and seen the slap.
“I should have come sooner,” she told me.
“You came.”
She sat beside me while the officer photographed my cheek.
Outside, Delaney’s voice rose.
“She’s giving you half the story. We’re family.”
The officer at my table kept writing. For the first time that afternoon, someone’s certainty was not making me smaller.
They took Delaney away after interviewing everyone. Marcus remained beside the luggage, looking at the empty place where the police car had been.
He asked the officer whether he could speak to me.
“Not today,” I said.
He nodded through the window. I watched him wheel both suitcases down the path. Before he reached the sidewalk, he stopped and looked back at the house where I had raised him.
I closed the curtain.
My attorney, Evelyn Price, came the following morning carrying a folder and two plain bagels. Ruth had stayed overnight on the sofa. Between them, they persuaded me to eat half of one before we opened the papers.
The waiver lay on my table.
Someone had written my name with a careful upward sweep on the final letter. I never wrote it that way. My own signature ended abruptly, usually because I was already thinking about the next thing that needed doing.
“There’s no notary acknowledgment,” Evelyn said. “The closing agent accepted this as your written release. We’re requesting the entire file, including how they received it.”
“Can I get my money back?”
“We have a signed agreement and a release you deny signing. There’s a strong claim. First, we preserve the records and find where the proceeds went.”
The $620,000 had been the sale price, not what Marcus and Delaney had taken home. There had been a mortgage to pay, closing costs, other deductions. I knew that. Still, they had walked toward my house carrying luggage instead of the money they owed me.
Evelyn turned another page.
“We also need to discuss reporting the suspected forgery.”
My stomach tightened.
“If Marcus did it?”
“Then the investigation may involve Marcus.”
Ruth quietly gathered our plates. Neither woman tried to finish the decision for me.
I remembered signing permission slips with a sleeping child against my shoulder. I remembered teaching him to write his name. Now I was being asked whether I would let strangers examine what he had done with mine.
“Request everything,” I said.
Marcus called that afternoon. I let Evelyn answer on speaker.
“I need to tell her something before Delaney does.”
Evelyn’s expression changed.
“You should get your own lawyer before making any statements.”
“I will. But Mom needs to know there’s another paper.”
I put my untouched tea down.
“What paper?”
“A statement about your memory.”
The refrigerator motor stopped. In the sudden quiet, I heard Ruth set a spoon carefully in the sink.
Marcus spoke faster.
