Chapter 5: A Familiar Hand
The message stayed on my screen while Rebecca lowered the laptop lid.
“The buyer already has what he needs,” I read aloud.
“Then we find out what he has,” Rebecca said. Her voice had gone flat in the way people’s voices do when they’re afraid and determined not to show it.
Christina watched me, not the phone. I could feel the question in her silence: Was I going to rush in, issue orders, and call that help?
I set the phone facedown.
“Let’s look at the signature,” I said. “Together.”
The document on the USB was a scan, its edges slightly crooked, my name typed beneath a long, practiced-looking signature. I had seen it before and felt only the wrongness of it. Now I pulled an old contract from the folder Rebecca had gathered and laid it beside the screen.
The real signature was mine: a cramped J, then a surname I’d learned to write quickly when I was young and impatient. The signature on the sale authorization had the same slant, the same careless finish—but the first letter curled beneath itself in a graceful loop I never made.
I’d seen that loop somewhere.
Christina leaned closer. “What is it?”
I reached for another paper, an old agreement from years ago. Claude had handled the signing; I remembered him setting the pages in front of me, tapping the lines with his pen. At the bottom, my signature carried that same neat curl—not in my handwriting, but in the dark flourish someone had added beside it.
“That mark isn’t mine,” I said.
Rebecca turned the page toward the light. “Could it be a witness mark?”
“Maybe. Claude used to keep copies of everything I signed. He’d tell me it was easier than asking twice.”
Christina’s face tightened. “He had your samples.”
The words landed differently now. Not an accusation I could push away as impossible. A fact with a shape.
“I don’t know if this proves he copied it,” I said. “But he had access.”
“Access isn’t the same as innocence,” Christina replied.
I wanted to defend Claude. For years, I’d trusted him to mind the details I didn’t want to mind. But every defense I reached for felt like another way of asking Christina to carry my doubt for me.
“You’re right,” I said. “It isn’t.”
She studied my face for a moment, then turned back to the laptop.
The video opened on a dim, tilted view of Christina’s apartment. A strip of hallway showed beyond the half-open door. The first sound was a soft click, followed by a pause.
Christina leaned over the screen. “I didn’t remember leaving the camera running.”
The timestamp sat in the corner. She dragged the playhead forward. A shadow crossed the narrow slice of hallway, then a woman’s voice came from beyond the frame.
“Christina?”
Florence.
Christina stopped the video. “That was earlier.”
“How much earlier?” I asked.
She checked the file details, then the time displayed on the footage. “Almost twenty minutes before the shouting.”
For a second, the room seemed to lose its air. Florence had not arrived in the middle of an argument, as I’d imagined while trying to soften what I’d seen. She had been inside Christina’s apartment long before the confrontation began.
“She came in,” Christina said, barely above a whisper. “Then she waited.”
Or talked. Or looked for the papers. I could not know which. The silence in the video offered no answer, only the fact of that early arrival—and the way Florence’s voice sounded when she finally called Christina’s name.
Rebecca picked up her phone. “I’m calling the buyer’s office.”
She found the number on the appointment notice and put the call on speaker. A woman answered after several rings. Rebecca gave her name and asked whether the sale of the lakeside property had been completed.
“No transfer has been completed,” the woman said. “We have an appointment scheduled for tomorrow morning.”
“Then you can put it on hold.”
“I’m not authorized to do that.”
“Do you have a document signed by Jonathan Prescott?”
A pause. Papers rustled on the other end.
“We have authorization from the seller,” the woman said. “The file is being handled through Mr. Mercer.”
My stomach clenched.
Rebecca’s eyes met mine. “And if we dispute it?”
“I was told you’ve been contacting people connected to the transaction. Please stop interfering with a private sale.”
Rebecca’s mouth fell open, then hardened. “We’re family.”
“I understand. But further calls may be treated as harassment.”
“By whom?” Rebecca snapped. “The person selling a house that isn’t his?”
The woman ended the call.
Rebecca stared at her phone as if she could force the voice to come back. Christina had gone quiet again. On the screen, Florence’s frozen shadow held its place in the hallway.
I looked at the papers, the false signature, the woman who had entered my daughter’s home before the shouting began. I had spent years letting other people handle what seemed inconvenient. Now someone was using that habit to take something my family could not replace.
A knock sounded at the front door.
Rebecca stood. Christina put one hand on Leo’s shoulder, drawing him close without taking her eyes off me.
“I’ll see who it is,” I said.
Rebecca moved ahead of me. “No. Stay where we can all see you.”
She checked the window beside the door, then opened it only as far as the chain allowed. No one stood on the porch. A small padded envelope lay on the mat.
She brought it inside, keeping it in view as she set it on the table.
My name was written across the front in black ink. The handwriting was familiar enough to unsettle me, though not familiar enough to identify.
Inside was the gold band I had planned to wear that morning. It had been left in the hotel’s dressing suite after I stopped the ceremony.
A folded note rested beneath it.
Rebecca reached for the paper. I took it first.
The first line said, Come alone.
May you like
I turned the note over. Beneath it, in the same neat handwriting, was the second line:
Bring the USB, or Christina loses her last chance.
