Thirty-six thousand dollars, handed over because I believed my mother was helping my wife and son.
Instead, she had been using it to fund a party that was never about Frederick.
It was a stage.
A gathering of witnesses who could later confirm that my mother lived in that house, ran that house, controlled that house.
"She was building a paper trail," I said.
"That's our read," Harlow said.
"The party, the relatives, the way she positioned herself as the head of the household — Richard coached her on all of it.
If Amy had signed those documents, and if the forged deed had been filed, you would have had a very expensive legal fight on your hands."
"But Amy didn't sign."
"No.
She didn't."
I looked at my wife.
She was staring at the table.
Frederick shifted in her arms and she adjusted him without thinking, the way mothers do when it becomes as natural as breathing.
"Amy," I said.
She looked up.
"Why didn't you tell me any of this?"
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, "Because every time I tried to say something about your mother, you defended her.
Not because you're a bad person.
Because she's your mother and you loved her." She looked back down.
"I didn't want to be the one who broke that."
That was the sentence that cost me the most.
Not the forgery.
Not the thirty-six thousand dollars.
Not the party or the dirty dishes or the plastic stool.
The fact that my wife had carried all of it alone because she was trying to protect my feelings.
---
Harlow gave us twenty minutes before the next conversation.
I stepped outside and called my lawyer, a man named Dennis Park who had handled my property purchase four years earlier.
I told him everything in under three minutes.
Dennis was quiet for a moment.
"Connor, I need you to do something right now.
Don't touch any of your financial accounts.
Don't transfer anything, don't pay anything, don't respond to any emails about property or banking until I've had a chance to review what they filed."
"You think there's more?"
"A forged deed is one document.
People who forge deeds rarely stop at one document." He paused.
"I'll be at the station in forty minutes."
I went back inside.
Mason was in a separate room.
Through the narrow window in the door I could see him sitting with his arms crossed, staring at the floor.
He looked younger than I remembered.
He was twenty-six.
I had given him money for his first car.
Harlow came back and opened the door to the interview room.
"Your cousin wants to talk," he said.
---
Mason didn't look at me when I sat down across from him.
"I didn't know it would go this far," he said.
"Start from the beginning," I said.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Uncle Richard came to me about eighteen months ago.
He said your dad had always planned to leave the house to Aunt Teresa.
He said you'd taken it from her without knowing it.