“He did,” Lauren said quietly. “He made sure.” “He tried,” I said. “But you’re here. At two in the morning. In my kitchen.” She looked up at me with red eyes. “There’s something else,” she said. “Something I didn’t tell you on the phone.” I waited. “Back in May, Dad asked to borrow money. He said it was for a deposit on a new apartment. Eight thousand dollars.” She twisted her hands together. “I gave it to him. It was most of my savings. He said he’d pay me back by September.”
“Did he?” She shook her head. “When I asked about it in August, he said things were tight. That’s when he started telling me about the condo and the landlord and Vanessa’s credit.” She swallowed hard. “Mom, I think the eight thousand was for the moving truck. And the storage unit. And—I don’t know. Whatever he was planning.”
I reached across the table and took both her hands in mine.
“Then he used you twice,” I said. “And neither time was your fault.”
“I should have known.”
“You were trying to love both your parents. That’s not a crime, sweetheart. That’s just being a good daughter to a father who didn’t deserve it.”
She cried again, quieter this time.
Rachel, who had been sitting silently at the end of the table this entire time, finally spoke.
“Lauren,” she said. “Can I tell you something about your mother?”
Lauren wiped her eyes and nodded.
“When we were girls,” Rachel said, “your mom was the bravest person I knew. When I was fourteen, a boy at school spread a nasty rumor about me. Do you know who marched up to him in front of the entire cafeteria and made him take it back? Your mother. She was eleven. She was half his size.” Rachel smiled. “Somewhere along the way, she forgot she was that girl. Today, she remembered.”
Lauren looked at me like she’d never seen me before.
“I didn’t know that,” she said.
“There’s a lot I never told you,” I said. “But I’m going to start.”
PART 9
The weeks that followed were not easy.
I wish I could say that everything wrapped up neatly the moment the moving truck pulled away. It didn’t. Real life doesn’t work that way.
Detective Moreno called me the following Thursday. The signature on the lease had been compared to my signature on the closing documents, my driver’s license, and a dozen other papers. It was, in her words, “a poor imitation.” They’d also found something else.
The lease was a template.
A free one, downloaded from a website.
The download history on Mark’s laptop, which Vanessa had voluntarily turned over, showed he’d downloaded it on August 28th.
Six days before my offer was even accepted.
“He was planning this from the moment he knew you were house hunting,” Detective Moreno said. “He just needed you to pick a house.”
The prosecutor’s office took the case.
Mark, through a lawyer, tried to argue that it had all been a misunderstanding. That he’d genuinely believed I’d agreed. That the lease had been a “draft” he’d intended to give me to sign. That Lauren had given him the code freely.
But the texts were the texts.
She always folds.
She’ll want to settle.
Half that house should’ve been mine anyway.
In February, Mark pleaded guilty to criminal trespass and a reduced charge related to the forged document. The judge gave him probation, a fine, community service, and a court order requiring him to stay away from my property and to have no contact with me except through attorneys.
He was also ordered to repay Lauren the eight thousand dollars.
Patricia Ng had made sure of that. “Restitution,” she’d said, with a small, satisfied smile. “It’s one of my favorite words.”
I was in the courtroom when the judge read the sentence.
Mark didn’t look at me once.
When it was over and the bailiff led him toward the side door, I realized I wasn’t waiting for him to turn around. I wasn’t hoping for an apology. I wasn’t rehearsing what I’d say if he tried to explain.
I just picked up my purse, walked out to the parking lot, and drove home.
To my house.
PART 10
Lauren came back in March and stayed for a long weekend.
She helped me paint the kitchen. Sage green, the way I’d always wanted. We played music too loud and got paint in our hair and ate grilled cheese sandwiches standing at the counter because the table was covered in drop cloths.
On Saturday afternoon, she stood back from the wall with a paintbrush in her hand and said, “Mom? Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why didn’t you call Dad that day? When you first saw the truck. You always used to call him. Every time something happened, you’d call him and try to work it out.”
I set down my roller.
“I almost did,” I said. “My thumb was right on his name.”
“What stopped you?”
I thought about how to explain it.
“For twenty-seven years,” I said, “whenever your father did something that hurt me, I’d call him and ask him to explain. And he always had an explanation. And somehow, by the end of the conversation, I was the one apologizing. I was the one who’d overreacted. I was the one who’d misunderstood.”
Lauren nodded slowly.
“That morning,” I said, “I was looking at a camera. I could see exactly what was happening. And I realized that if I called him, he’d do what he always did. He’d talk until I didn’t trust my own eyes anymore.”
I picked the roller back up.
“So I decided to trust what I saw. Instead of asking him to tell me what I was seeing.”
Lauren was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, “I think I’ve been doing that too. With Dad. And with other people. With my boyfriend, kind of.” She made a face. “Ex-boyfriend now, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. After everything with Dad, I started noticing stuff. He did the same thing. He’d say something hurtful, and then when I got upset, he’d say I was too sensitive.” She laughed a little. “That’s literally what Dad used to say to you.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t want to end up like—” She stopped herself. Her face went red. “Mom, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You can say it. You didn’t want to end up like me.”
“Not like you,” she said quickly. “Like… the way things were. For you. Before.”
I smiled at her.
“Honey,” I said, “neither did I. That’s why I left.”
She put down her paintbrush and hugged me, and we both got sage-green paint all over our shirts, and neither of us cared.
PART 11
On the first warm weekend in April, I finally met the rest of my neighbors.
Walt and his golden retriever, Biscuit, came over first, carrying a pie his late wife used to make. Then the woman with the toddler, whose name turned out to be Priya. Then the teenage boy with the basketball, Marcus, who offered to mow my lawn for fifteen dollars a week and then apologized for “being kind of nosy that day with the police.”
“Marcus,” I said, “you can be nosy anytime you want. That’s what neighbors are for.”
He grinned.
Walt stood on my back porch and looked out at the maple tree. It was just starting to bud, little red tips appearing on every branch.
