Chapter 16 - The Signature at the Hospital
I read the date again. September 14. The day my mother died. The day I sat beside her hospital bed until the nurses gently told me she was gone.
“I didn't sign this,” I said.
The developer's lawyer looked at me with polite disbelief. “That's an issue for your counsel.”
“Then she'll deal with it,” Mara replied, stepping between us. “Don't contact my client directly again.”
Back in her office, Mara laid the two deeds side by side. The first claimed Elliot had authorized the building transfer. The second claimed I had granted unrestricted driveway access seven years earlier. Together they made the property look ready to sell.
“The signatures are separate problems,” she said. “We'll request the original records and the notary journals. Meanwhile, the temporary order remains in place.”
I remembered something from the hospital: my mother's blue scarf, folded beneath her pillow. After she died, I had taken it home. The silver box now held that same scarf. In its hem I found a little folded receipt for a document-copy service, dated the week before Mom entered hospice.
On the receipt she'd written: ORIGINALS WITH M. VEGA. DO NOT TRUST THE TRUST OFFICE.
Marisol still had the title receipt. Maybe she had more.
We called. “Check behind the kitchen cabinet,” she said. “June made me promise never to tell anyone unless they came for the building.”
By evening, Marisol had found a sealed packet containing an original survey, the trust's recorded restriction, and a letter from my mother explaining why she had protected that narrow strip of land.
The letter ended with one sentence that made me sit down.
May you like
If Anna is ever asked to choose between money and someone's home, I hope she remembers the price of a roof is never just a number.
Then Mara found another page beneath the survey: a carbon copy of an instruction to transfer funds, bearing Nick's signature from when he was seventeen.
