affidavit. The old forged loan. The same heavy hand. The same strange hook at the end.
“Mr. Hollis,” said Special Agent Harlan. He had a quiet voice. The kind that made people lean in to hear it. “In 2011, your father, Walter Hollis, swore under oath that you forged his signature on a sixty-thousand-dollar loan against this property.”
My father’s face went white.
Not pale. White. Like somebody had pulled a plug.
“That’s—” he said. “My father never—he never reported—”
“He didn’t report it,” said Dalton. “He wrote it down. He had it notarized. And he put it in a safe in the basement of this house, with a letter to his granddaughter. Where it stayed until this morning.”
My father turned and looked at me.
“What safe?” he said. “There’s no safe. I’ve been through this whole house.”
“Not the whole house,” I said.
Nobody moved for a long moment.
Then Chloe said, in a small voice, “Dad?”
My father didn’t look at her.
“Dad. Is it true?”
“It’s complicated, sweetheart.”
“Did you take Kate’s money?”
“Chloe, honey, let’s not do this in front of—”
“Did you?”
My mother stepped between them. “Your father was trying to help you. Everything we did, we did for you. You and Vance were drowning. The credit cards. The truck payment. The medical bills. Kate has so much. She doesn’t have a family to take care of. It wasn’t hurting her—”
“It wasn’t hurting her?” Chloe stood up. It took her a second, with the baby. Vance reached out to help her and she shook his hand off. “You told me she offered. You
told me Kate wanted us to have the house. You said she was excited about being an aunt and she wanted to give us a gift. You said she’d call when she got back.”
