“At night,” I said dully, hearing my own voice like it belonged to a stranger. “Your appraiser came at night. At 11 p.m. He walked around my house and looked into my windows while I slept.”
Graves spread his hands. “The client requested evening. Said it needed to be discreet.”
Pernell’s palm hit the desk—one hard slap that made Graves flinch. “Discreet for whom?”
Graves swallowed. “I didn’t know anything was forged.”
Pernell’s eyes didn’t soften. “What happened after the appraisal?”
Graves clicked into the file. “The property was valued at four hundred twenty thousand dollars,” he said, like he was reading any other number. “$420,000.”
The number echoed in my skull.
“He agreed to list it,” Graves continued. “We posted it. This morning.”
“When?” I asked, voice sharp now, anger breaking through the shock.
“This morning,” Graves repeated. “And a buyer already called. Cash buyer. Wants to move quickly. We set a preliminary contract meeting for the day after tomorrow.”
Two days.
Two days and my home could’ve been wrapped in someone else’s paperwork.
I stared at Pernell. He stared back, and in his eyes I saw the same conclusion forming: this wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a plan.
“Who’s the buyer?” Pernell asked.
Graves shook his head quickly. “Just a phone number. He said he has money ready.”
Pernell wrote it down. “This deal is canceled. You’re turning over every document. There’s a fraud investigation now.”
Graves’s face went pale. “But we—”
“You can explain your ‘good faith’ later,” Pernell cut in. “Right now, you cooperate.”
When we walked out into the cold daylight, the city traffic felt too loud, too normal.
I didn’t feel my feet on the sidewalk. Pernell’s hand hovered near my elbow like he thought I might fall.
Because sometimes betrayal doesn’t arrive with a bang—it arrives as a cleanly printed form and a signature that almost looks like yours.
Pernell guided me into a diner across the street. Vinyl booths, coffee smell, a waitress who called me “hon” without knowing my life had cracked open. He ordered me tea with sugar. Coffee for himself.
I wrapped both hands around the hot cup and still couldn’t get warm.
“Why?” I asked, staring at the swirl of steam. “Why would he do that?”
Pernell sighed the way a man sighs when he’s seen the same story in different costumes. “Money, Elaine. Four hundred twenty thousand dollars is a lot. Either he needed it or he wanted to start over.”
“But we’ve been together thirty-two years,” I said, and the words sounded naïve even to me. “I built my whole life around him.”
Pernell didn’t argue. He just said, “People change. Or they finally show you who they are.”
I swallowed tea that tasted like metal in my mouth. “What do I do now?”
“We go to the station. You file a report. We open a case. We subpoena records. We order handwriting analysis on that signature. We look at the notary.”
