Minutes later, the police arrived. My mother started screaming. She shoved an officer and insisted that the house belonged to her. Then my cousin Mason suddenly tried to slip out through the side gate carrying a folder he had been hiding. The police stopped him. When they opened it, everyone went silent. Inside was the original deed to my house.
As my mother was placed in handcuffs, still screaming insults at Amy, I finally understood the truth. That birthday party had never been about celebrating my son. It was only the first step in a plan to steal everything we owned.
The officer held up the deed and looked straight at Mason. "Want to explain why you had this?" Mason said nothing. But his hands were shaking. Teresa was still screaming from the driveway. "That house should have been mine! I raised him! Everything he has, he owes to me!"
One of the officers pulled me aside quietly. "Sir, this deed has been altered. Someone changed the ownership name. We're going to need you to come to the station."
My legs went cold. I looked back at Amy, still sitting in the car with Frederick pressed against her chest. She hadn't eaten a real meal. She hadn't slept properly in weeks. And the whole time, she had said nothing to me. Not one word. "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked her through the window. She looked down. "She said if I told you, she would make sure you chose her over us." That sentence broke something in me.
Then Mason's phone lit up on the ground where he'd dropped it. The screen showed a message from a number saved only as "Uncle R." It said: "Is it done? Did she sign?" Sign what? Who was Uncle R? I had never heard that name in my life.
The police station smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet. Amy sat beside me in a plastic chair, Frederick finally asleep against her shoulder. Someone had brought her a bottle of water and a packet of crackers from a vending machine. She ate them slowly, like she was afraid someone would take them away. I couldn't stop looking at her hands. The skin around her knuckles was raw from the dishes.
A detective named Harlow set a folder on the table between us. He was a quiet man, mid-fifties, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. "Mr. Bradley. The deed your cousin was carrying — it's a forgery. A good one, but not good enough." He opened the folder and slid a page toward me. "The notary stamp is real. The signature is not."
I looked at the signature line. Connor James Bradley. "That's not my handwriting," I said. "No," Harlow said. "It isn't. Whoever did this had access to your personal documents. Enough to copy your middle name, your full address, your mortgage reference number." He tapped the page. "This wasn't put together in a week. Someone planned this for a long time."