I didn't argue. I had pushed the confrontation exactly as far as the law would allow. I reached out, slowly taking the forged affidavit back from the officer, and carefully tucked it into my leather vest.
I turned back to the house. Claire was still standing near the door, her eyes squeezed shut, tears spilling silently down her pale cheeks.
Then I looked up at the second-story window.
Leo was still standing there. But something had changed. His small, pale hands were still pressing the blue spiral notebook against the glass. The jagged black letters—DON'T LET HIM IN—were still perfectly visible.
But Leo wasn't looking at me anymore.
His wide, terrified eyes were locked directly on the driveway. He was staring straight down at his father’s black Mercedes.
The realization hit me like a physical blow to the chest, aggravating my cracked rib and stealing my breath. Don't let him in. Leo hadn't written that sign to keep me away. He had seen David’s car approaching the neighborhood gates. He was begging me not to let his father back inside the house.
My hands shook as I gripped the handlebars of my Harley. I swung my leg over the leather seat, ignoring the sharp, stabbing pain in my side. I fired up the engine, the loud roar shattering the quiet suburban tension. I looked David dead in the eye. He offered me a cold, triumphant smile, absolutely certain that his money and his zip code had won the morning.
I kicked the bike into gear and rode out of Harrington Oaks, leaving the pristine white columns behind.
But I didn't go home.
Once I cleared the gates, I pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and pulled the forged affidavit from my vest. I looked at the bottom right corner. The notary’s seal was stamped firmly in blue ink. Arthur Vance. Commission #88492. Davidson County.
Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled my motorcycle into the cracked asphalt parking lot of a decaying strip mall on the south side of Nashville. It was a miserable stretch of real estate squeezed between a discount liquor store and a payday loan office. The storefront read Vance Legal Services & Tax Prep in peeling vinyl letters. It was exactly the kind of place a man like David Sterling would never visit unless he was buying a ghost.
I killed the engine, pushed the glass door open, and stepped inside.
The office smelled of stale coffee and ozone from an overheated copy machine. Sitting behind a cheap veneer desk was a thin, balding man in his late forties, wearing a yellowed dress shirt. He looked up from a stack of tax forms, his eyes immediately dropping to my heavy boots, taking in the dark tattoos wrapping around my knuckles and creeping up my neck.
"We're closed for lunch," the man said quickly, pushing his chair back a few inches.
"Are you Arthur Vance?" I asked, walking slowly toward the desk.
"I said we're closed," he repeated, reaching for his desk phone.
I didn't yell. I didn't raise my hands. I just reached into my vest, pulled out the folded affidavit, and dropped it flat onto his desk, right on top of his tax forms.
"You notarized this signature on Tuesday afternoon," I said, pointing to the blue seal. "It surrenders my contact rights to my grandson. It’s a very serious legal document. The only problem, Arthur, is that I was lying in a hospital trauma ward in Memphis on Tuesday."
Vance’s face drained of color. He stared at the document, the silence in the cheap office stretching until it felt brittle enough to snap.
"I verify IDs," Vance stammered, his voice thin and reedy. "A man came in. He had a Tennessee driver's license. The name matched. If he had a fake ID, that’s on him, not me. I’m protected under state law."
"You verify IDs," I repeated softly. "And you log them. By state law, every single notarized signature that strips family rights has to be recorded in your bound notary ledger. With a signature, a date, and an ID serial number."
Vance swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the heavy, leather-bound ledger sitting on the corner of his desk.