They’d taken something real. A genuine document I’d actually signed, for a small and harmless
reason, years before any of this happened. And they’d used its number, its notary stamp, its official record, to build something enormous and false on top of it.
Something that looked real to a bank. Something that looked real to a county recorder.
Just like the payments from my phone. Just like the meeting minutes. Real pieces, put together into a lie.
And unless I could challenge it the right way, through the right legal channels, I was going to lose the last thing in the world that still had my name on it.
Opal came down the back steps slowly, with her cane.
She looked down at the envelope in the grass. Then at me.
“Leave it,” I said. “Don’t touch it.”
“I wasn’t going to touch it,” she said. “I was going to take a picture of it before we call your lawyer.”
She took out her phone and took three pictures of the envelope lying on the lawn, from three different angles. Then she took a picture of the license plate of the gray sedan, which was just turning the corner at the end of the street.
HKD 4719.
“There,” she said. “Now you’ve got the rest of it.”
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I didn’t even try. I sat at Opal’s kitchen table with the deed spread out in front of me and a cup of coffee going cold at my elbow.
I read every page. Then I read them again. I read the tiny print. I read the recorder’s notes in the
margins.
Around two in the morning, I heard the stairs creak.
Opal came into the kitchen in a pale blue bathrobe and slippers, with her white hair down around her shoulders. I’d never seen it down before. It came almost to her waist.
