Don't Sign It
I broke every speed limit Miller's Creek had ever posted and made the fifteen-minute drive in nine.
The front door was unlocked. I didn't knock.
They were exactly where Priya had described them — Odessa at the kitchen table, a stranger with a laptop and an embossing stamp arranged like a tiny assembly line of theft, and a stack of papers in front of my old friend with three yellow signing-here flags already fluttering off the edges like flags planted on a hill somebody else had already claimed.
"Don't sign it," I said.
Every head in the room turned.
"Terrence, thank God," Priya said from the doorway behind me, and I realized she hadn't left after all — she'd just been keeping the front door in sight, waiting.
"You need to leave," Garrett said, but there wasn't much command left in it. A cornered animal sounds different than a confident one, and I'd heard both now.
"Odessa," I said, crouching by her chair, keeping my voice at the volume we'd used over coffee that morning. "The taxes were never late. You don't owe the county a dollar. Garrett formed a fake company to buy this house from you for sixty percent of what it's worth, and there's a state investigation open into him right now for exactly this kind of thing."
She looked down at the pen in her hand like she'd never seen it before.
"Is that true," she asked Garrett, not me, "what he's saying?"
And Garrett — cornered, out of moves, watching a hundred and forty thousand dollars of somebody else's debt evaporate in front of him — finally showed her the face he'd been keeping for everyone but her.
"You don't understand what I owe people," he snapped. "This house should've been half mine anyway, Grandma promised it to my father before he died, and you've just been sitting on it collecting dust while I—"
"While you what," I said. "Drained her savings? Rewrote her pills? Filmed her signing things she couldn't read?"
He didn't answer that. He didn't need to.
The notary quietly closed her laptop and gathered her things without a word, professional instinct kicking in a beat before the situation could get any worse. Odessa set the pen down on the table, gently, like it had done something it hadn't meant to.
Blue and red light swept once across the kitchen wall — a patrol car pulling into the driveway, the deputy Higgins had called on his way in already stepping out.
Garrett looked at the door, looked at his aunt, and ran the same math I'd watched him run two nights earlier over an extra place setting. This time he chose to leave, taillights swinging out of the driveway too fast, gravel spitting behind him one final time.
Priya let out a breath she seemed to have been holding for six weeks. "It's over," she said.
The deputy stepped back inside, notebook still open. "Ma'am, Mr. Boyd — I ran his name on the way over." He looked between us. "This isn't the first complaint against him. It's just the first one anybody managed to stop in time."