The examiner returned her findings in April. Priscilla had not forged anything. My son had.
Ambrose signed my name to the transfer on a Tuesday in February, alone, at a strip-mall notary who did not check identification. His wife believed every word he told her. She drove up that mountain at four in the morning with four movers and a folder because her husband had handed it to her and said the paperwork was finished and that I already knew.
The charges against her were dropped in May. The district attorney offered Ambrose a plea and he took it. No jail, given no prior record. Restitution of my legal costs, eleven thousand dollars, and a felony that will follow him to sixty-eight.
He never told me why. My attorney learned the rest from the file. He had taken a second mortgage on their house in Fernbrook to cover a business that failed in 2023, and he had been three months from losing it, and he had decided that the cabin his father built could be converted faster than a conversation with his mother could be survived.
Priscilla filed for divorce in September. She wrote to me in October. One page, careful handwriting, no request in it. She said she had spent four years being taught that I was difficult and that she had never once questioned the source. I wrote back. We speak now, twice a month, which is more often than I speak to my son.
Ambrose has not come up the mountain in two years. He sends a card at Christmas addressed to Mother, no signature, as if the word covers what the name cannot.
I still drink my tea cold sometimes, out of habit now rather than shock. The floorboards in the entry have a scuff from a hand truck that never got used.
I spent that whole morning certain I had caught a vulture circling my roof. I had. I just did not look closely enough at which one had my father-in-law’s eyes.
