Chapter 6: The Signature She Never Gave
I took pictures of the bent latch and the empty place where my mother’s ledger had been. Then I shut the garage door and carried the trust box inside.
I set my phone beside the sealed envelope and opened Daniel’s photograph of the draft easement. The signature on the page was blurred, but the shape of the R bothered me. It began with a narrow loop, then swept into a long flourish beneath the rest of my name.
I knew that flourish.
In the desk drawer, I found the folder David and I had kept for old household papers. School emergency cards. Insurance forms. The forms I’d signed when I started working at the middle school—paperwork David could have found without even looking for it.
On one card, my signature ended in the same long, careless sweep.
I held the phone over it, enlarging Daniel’s photograph, then lowered it again. The image was too poor to prove anything. A resemblance wasn’t proof. But seeing my own handwriting on the old form made the draft look less like a stranger’s clumsy guess.
Someone could have copied it.
I put the forms back where I’d found them. My fingers had gone cold.
Daniel called before I could reach for him.
“I’m sorry about the ledger,” he said.
“Sorry won’t help me find it.”
“No. It won’t.”
His silence held no argument, which was more useful than sympathy.
“I want that soil tested,” I said.
“I collected a sample this morning,” he replied. “The disturbed patch by the creek. If you can meet me, we can document where it came from and take it in together.”
An hour later, we stood at the edge of the parcel. The creek moved under a skim of brown leaves, carrying the small, ordinary sounds of water around stones. Beyond the bank, the exposed soil looked darker than the ground around it.
Daniel showed me the sealed sample container and his notes. I photographed the patch, the nearest survey stake, and the container’s label. He added the collection time and location to the record, then signed across the seal. I wrote my initials beside his.
It felt absurdly small against the rows of stakes, the missing ledger, and the truck tracks we’d found before. Still, the sample was something we could place in someone else’s hands and ask them to examine.
At the lab, a technician in a blue sweater checked the seal before accepting the container.
“You’ll run the expedited panel?” Daniel asked.
“I’ll flag it for expedited testing,” she said. “We’ll call when we have results.”
No promise. No answer. Just the sample passing through a window into a room I couldn’t enter.
In the parking lot, my phone rang.
Angela.
For one long second, I watched her name on the screen. Then I answered.
“Rebecca, I have to tell you something.”
The strain in her voice stripped away the practiced calm she’d used at my kitchen table.
“Tell me.”
“I sent Graham the scans from your mother’s papers. Not just to David. To Graham.”
My grip tightened around the phone.
“You told me you gave David access.”
“I did. But later Graham asked me for copies directly. He said Copperline needed to understand the trust before making an offer.”
“And you believed him.”
“I believed it was an offer.” She swallowed. “I thought they wanted to buy the parcel. I thought if I sent the papers, they’d make it clean and simple.”
“You sent him more than the trust records.”
A pause.
“Yes.”
“What else?”
“A saved image of your signature.”
The lab building seemed to tilt a fraction beneath the gray sky. I looked at Daniel, who had stopped beside the car, watching my face.
“Where did you get that image?”
“I had it saved with the scans. I don’t remember exactly—there were papers from your mother’s house, and other things. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You knew I hadn’t agreed to anything.”
“I know.” Her breath broke. “I’m not asking you to excuse it. I just need you to know I thought it was for a purchase offer, not a document saying you’d already consented.”
I looked at the lab receipt in my hand. My name, the sample number, the time it had been accepted. Proof of one small thing done honestly.
“Did Graham say what he planned to do with the image?”
“He said it would help prepare the offer. I should have asked more. I should have called you.”
“Yes,” I said. “You should have.”
There was no comfort in the words. I didn’t soften them for her.
“I can send you the emails,” Angela said quickly. “The messages with Graham. I still have them. If I forward them, you’ll see what he asked for.”
“Send them now.”
“I’m trying.” I heard a faint tap, then silence. “It’s not going through. I’ll call you back in a minute.”
“Angela—”
The line clicked dead.
I called her back. It rang twice and went to voicemail. I tried again. The same thing.
Daniel opened the passenger door.
“Did she send anything?”
“No.”
My phone buzzed before I could put it away. Graham Pike’s name appeared above a new message.
Stop involving Angela. She has already made enough mistakes.
I read it once, then again. He hadn’t said what he would do. He hadn’t needed to.
May you like
I called Angela a third time.
Her phone had gone silent.
